Kevon Felmine

Feel­ings of help­less­ness and hope­less­ness, weight changes and self-loathing are be­com­ing the norm for for­mer steel work­ers who were left job­less when Arcelor­Mit­tal, Point Lisas, closed its gates last March.

It is a wor­ry­ing but ex­pect­ed out­come for the Steel Work­ers Union (SWUTT) who warned of the so­cial im­pacts when the multi­na­tion­al iron and steel pro­duc­ers left work­ers with on­ly a month's pay.

SWUTT gen­er­al sec­re­tary Lancelot Smart said the de­pres­sion was so "ter­ri­ble" that an ex­ec­u­tive mem­ber re­cent­ly re­signed, gave up his union phone and has not been heard from for the past week.

Smart said many of the 1,000-plus for­mer work­ers de­pend on hand­outs to eat and send their chil­dren to school. While they have been able to dis­trib­ute ham­pers through spon­sors and find some jobs through an em­ploy­ment agency they re­cent­ly start­ed, he said some for­mer work­ers were too ashamed to ask for help.

He said many of those who found work are be­ing ex­ploit­ed by em­ploy­ers pay­ing be­tween $15 and $20 an hour for skilled jobs.

"Some work­ers have been for­tu­nate, but the work­ers that are suf­fer­ing the most are those be­tween 45 to 50 years old. That is over 100 peo­ple. I think peo­ple seem to want to take ad­van­tage of the for­mer steel work­ers. They see their sit­u­a­tion and feel that they can work them for next to noth­ing.

"A lot of the ex-work­ers said they were get­ting jobs, but peo­ple want to pay them $15, $16 and $20. Some were get­ting the same kind of jobs they were do­ing at the plant, like me­chan­i­cal and main­te­nance type jobs and peo­ple want to take ad­van­tage of them," Smart said.

Last March, Arcelor­Mit­tal was in­struct­ed by its cor­po­rate head in Lux­em­bourg to shut down the plant and liq­ui­date its as­sets as it was bur­dened by $1.3 bil­lion in debt. The com­pa­ny said de­spite ef­forts to avoid the clo­sure, lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al chal­lenges had put it un­der se­vere fi­nan­cial dis­tress since the sec­ond half of 2015. This led to the clo­sure of down­stream com­pa­nies, Cen­tral Trinidad Steel Ltd (Cen­trin) and Tube City IMS.

In April, David Fran­cis, 48, com­mit­ted sui­cide. His rel­a­tives said he was frus­trat­ed at not be­ing able to pro­vide for his fam­i­ly.

Sev­er­al large protests were held by the Joint Trade Union Move­ment, who called on the Gov­ern­ment to amend the Re­trench­ment and Sev­er­ance Ben­e­fits Act.