Renu­ka Singh

Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go's (TSTT) Vol­un­tary Sep­a­ra­tion and Vol­un­tary Ear­ly Em­ploy­ment Re­tire­ment Plans (VSP/VEERP) have hit an­oth­er snag–sev­er­al for­mer em­ploy­ees have re­ceived no pay­out since leav­ing their jobs in June.

The Sun­day Guardian learned that as many as 27 man­agers ac­cept­ed VSP/VEERP but were yet to be paid. If un­re­solved, this could have a domi­no ef­fect on the 290 man­age­ment staff that are ex­pect­ed to par­tic­i­pate in the pro­gramme on a month­ly ba­sis from this month to March 2015.Two of the 27 for­mer man­agers re­ceived a 30 per cent pay­out in Ju­ly and noth­ing since, while the oth­er 25 have re­mained un­paid.

TSTT's ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of Hu­man Re­sources, Harigob­in Jhinkoo, blamed work stop­pages at the Board of In­land Rev­enue (BIR) for de­lays in mak­ing the promised pay­outs."The truth is a num­ber of per­sons ac­cept­ed the VSP and there has been a de­lay in the fi­nal pay­ments but that is be­cause of the chal­lenges at the BIR and the in­dus­tri­al ac­tion on their side," he said.

"As you must be aware, BIR stopped work­ing for some time and then they were com­ing in for half-days and a few hours, so that dis­rup­tion at BIR caused the de­lay that we are now ex­pe­ri­enc­ing." Jhinkoo said the 30 per cent pay­out was at TSTT's dis­cre­tion and was made when the com­pa­ny recog­nised the de­lay was caus­ing fi­nan­cial hard­ship for some for­mer staff."We sought to pro­vide some re­lief," he said.

Jhinkoo said the worst of the wait was over."We have been as­sured by the BIR that they are back to some sem­blance of nor­mal op­er­a­tions and they have al­ready cre­at­ed the in­di­vid­ual cas­es. The feed­back from the BIR is that they are rapid­ly treat­ing with the back­log," he said. "There should be some re­lief by the end of the next month."

Some 318 ju­nior and se­nior staff, most rep­re­sent­ed by the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers Union (CWU), have al­so signed on for the VSP/VEERP pro­gramme.How­ev­er, this mat­ter is cur­rent­ly stalled at the ne­go­ti­a­tions ta­ble. It was sent to the Min­istry of Labour for res­o­lu­tion and then to the In­dus­tri­al Court when the min­istry was un­able to re­solve the mat­ter.

CWU sec­re­tary gen­er­al John Julien said the mat­ter was still pend­ing for ju­nior and se­nior staff rep­re­sent­ed by the union. He said the CWU was not the bar­gain­ing unit for the man­agers who were now seek­ing re­lief.