Shal­iza?Has­sanali

Pres­i­dent gen­er­al of the Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union (OW­TU), An­cel Ro­get, is not on­ly ful­ly sup­port­ing the sus­pen­sion of five man­agers from the Hu­man Re­sources De­part­ment at State-owned Petrotrin, he wants the com­pa­ny to go one step fur­ther and fire them.

He yes­ter­day called for the ter­mi­na­tion of sus­pend­ed em­ploy­ees Ry­er­son Ba­goo, Fa­ree­da Mo­hammed, Gillian Cherotiere, Fran­ka Mo­hammed and Bian­ca At­tong, say­ing the union had long been high­light­ing the un­fair hir­ing prac­tices at the com­pa­ny.

The em­ploy­ees, who were sus­pend­ed on Tues­day fol­low­ing the con­clu­sion of a four-year au­dit in­to a re­cruit­ment ex­er­cise, have al­ready sought le­gal ad­vice on the com­pa­ny's ac­tions, the T&T Guardian was told yes­ter­day.

Ro­get could not say how long the work­ers were sus­pend­ed for and if they were col­lect­ing their salaries but claimed many em­ploy­ees who se­cured cushy jobs there in the last four years had ranked last or sec­ond to last in their in­ter­views.He said many of the high-lev­el po­si­tions were filled at Petrotrin "by UNC sup­port­ers on­ly on the ba­sis of par­ty loy­al­ty.

"In­struc­tions were giv­en to put them in top-lev­el po­si­tions. Some of them had ab­solute­ly no in­ter­view at all. Some of those jobs were not even ad­ver­tised," Ro­get said.

In go­ing for­ward, Ro­get said the OW­TU would en­sure top man­agers and ex­ec­u­tives in the HFC, cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions, HR, se­cu­ri­ty, med­ical, fi­nance and pro­cure­ment de­part­ments, who are un­wor­thy of the po­si­tions they cur­rent­ly hold, are ter­mi­nat­ed.

He added: "I have ab­solute­ly no fear of any­body say­ing any­thing good about the OW­TU. We call for those per­sons to go for quite some time but no­body lis­tened.

"The OW­TU sup­ports 100 per cent those sus­pen­sions. As a mat­ter of fact, we feel the com­pa­ny has to go fur­ther, in that not just to sus­pend them but to re­move them from the sys­tem. We are call­ing for them to go and for good rea­sons.

"There are a lot of high-pay­ing jobs oc­cu­pied by per­sons who are not sup­posed to be in those jobs in the first place."

No dis­crim­i­na­tion

Ro­get, how­ev­er, said that the sus­pen­sions were not a dis­crim­i­na­to­ry act by Petrotrin.

"It is not eth­nic cleans­ing. We know they will la­bel it as that. We are not tak­en aback, not for one mo­ment, with the claim of eth­nic cleans­ing. We are call­ing for the cor­rect per­son, re­gard­less of re­li­gion, race, ge­o­graph­ic lo­ca­tion, po­lit­i­cal af­fil­i­a­tion and so on, to be put in the cor­rect po­si­tions."

He said the lack of com­pe­tence of many work­ers in high po­si­tions had led to Petrotrin's mis­man­age­ment over the years.

"We want to rec­on­cile the lat­est re­port, which we have iden­ti­fied, to de­ter­mine how far Petrotrin has gone in deal­ing with this chron­ic sit­u­a­tion.

"Petrotrin is chron­ic not be­cause of the work­ers, it is be­cause of poor man­age­ment... and it adds to poor man­age­ment of that en­ter­prise when you put per­sons who are in­com­pe­tent, un­qual­i­fied and who did not fol­low cor­rect pro­ce­dures in­to top lev­el and top-pay­ing po­si­tions."

Ro­get said if those work­ers did not ex­it Petrotrin they could crip­ple the com­pa­ny's op­er­a­tions.

"It (Petrotrin) would not on­ly go bank­rupt but peo­ple's lives will be at risk," he added.

Ques­tioned about the hir­ing of for­mer com­mu­ni­ca­tion min­is­ter Neil Parsan­lal as CEO of Petrotrin's Em­ploy­ee As­sis­tance Pro­grammes Ser­vices Ltd (EAP), Ro­get said it was "the union that brought that pro­pos­al many years ago, that saw us hav­ing in­scribed in­to our col­lec­tive agree­ment the EAP as a term and con­di­tion of em­ploy­ment.

"What they did, they dis­man­tled it. So we are call­ing for re­struc­tur­ing to be put back in place of a func­tion­ing EAP De­part­ment."

Asked if he saw Parsan­lal's ap­point­ment as be­ing po­lit­i­cal, Ro­get said no. He said he had no is­sue with po­si­tions be­ing filled at Petrotrin once due process was fol­lowed.

The five man­agers sus­pend­ed in­clud­ed the heads of staffing, HR tech­nol­o­gy and plan­ning poli­cies and con­trol.

The sus­pen­sions came days af­ter Petrotrin un­der­took a ma­jor or­gan­i­sa­tion­al shake-up in the face of falling oil prices and the hir­ing of for­mer com­mu­ni­ca­tion min­is­ter Neil Parsan­lal as CEO of Petrotrin's Em­ploy­ee As­sis­tance Pro­grammes Ser­vices Ltd.

Joy An­toine, head of the ex­ter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions and brand­ing, had de­fend­ed the com­pa­ny's ac­tions.

"As a re­sult of the au­dit find­ings and rec­om­men­da­tions and in keep­ing with stan­dard in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions prac­tice, fur­ther in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­volv­ing key em­ploy­ees are be­ing con­duct­ed. These in­ves­ti­ga­tions are cur­rent­ly un­der­way and as a re­sult, no fur­ther com­ments can be made at this time," An­toine ex­plained.