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Tuesday, March 18, 2025

T&TEC agrees to 9% wage hike for workers

by

20120419

State-owned T&T Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) yes­ter­day ac­cept­ed the In­dus­tri­al Court's rec­om­men­da­tion of a nine per cent salary in­crease for more than 2,000 em­ploy­ees. This came two weeks af­ter the court first made the rec­om­men­da­tion on April 5. The de­ci­sion set­tled ne­go­ti­a­tions be­tween the com­pa­ny and the Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union (OW­TU) for 2009-2011. This means the com­pa­ny will have to pay more than $170 mil­lion in back­pay to em­ploy­ees for that pe­ri­od.

The com­pa­ny will al­so have to pay an ad­di­tion­al $120 mil­lion an­nu­al­ly as a re­sult of the salary in­crease.

Ac­cord­ing to act­ing gen­er­al man­ag­er of T&TEC Kelvin Ram­sook, the in­crease, which was or­dered to be ap­plied at two per cent for 2009, two per cent for 2010 and five per cent for 2011, will be ap­plied to work­ers' salaries by the end of May. All back­pay is ex­pect­ed to be giv­en to work­ers by Au­gust. Pres­i­dent gen­er­al of the OW­TU An­cel Ro­get de­scribed the process as a long and dif­fi­cult road. "This set­tle­ment should have been ar­rived at for quite a while now, and the fact that it came so late in the day is still an in­jus­tice to T&TEC work­ers," said Ro­get. Ro­get said he felt the court had per­formed with a great lev­el of in­de­pen­dence, hav­ing looked at both the chal­lenges of T&TEC and that of the work­er.

He said in ad­di­tion to the nine per cent in­crease and in­creas­es in al­lowances, the set­tle­ment al­lowed week­ly-paid work­ers to ben­e­fit from a com­pa­ny sav­ings plan to which both the com­pa­ny and work­er con­tribute. Ro­get main­tained that there was a five per cent wage cap, but the OW­TU was able to re­move that cap. "As far as we are con­cerned, there is no cap at all," Ro­get said. The OW­TU al­so won a nine per cent in­crease for work­ers of the Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny of T&T and the Na­tion­al Pe­tro­le­um Mar­ket­ing Com­pa­ny Ltd. Ro­get said the next step would be to de­vel­op and pro­duce pro­pos­als for the new rounds of ne­go­ti­a­tions for T&TEC for the pe­ri­od 2012-2014.


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