Brent Zephyrine

Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er says he in­tends to use the T&T De­fence Force as part of a con­tin­gency plan to deal with the scourge of po­lice "sick­outs".He was speak­ing with re­porters yes­ter­day at a func­tion to mark the first an­niver­sary of the Pub­lic Trans­port Ser­vice Cor­po­ra­tion's (PTSC) Deluxe Coach Ser­vice (DCS) at the DCS lounge, St Vin­cent Street, Port-of-Spain.In at­ten­dance were the Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary in the min­istry, Cheryl Black­man, deputy gen­er­al man­ag­er (Op­er­a­tions) of PTSC Bri­an Juanette and chair­man of PTSC De­vant Ma­haraj.Warn­er said he would have paid po­lice of­fi­cers him­self if he could. How­ev­er, he not­ed po­lice of­fi­cers were sac­ri­fic­ing the man­date they owed to the na­tion's cit­i­zen­ry with their dere­lic­tion of du­ty.

He added: "I can hold no grief or re­spect for per­sons who do that (aban­don their du­ties)."Our busi­ness is to serve the pub­lic and we can­not use the pub­lic as pawns in this mat­ter and, there­fore, I want to re­peat, I am to­tal­ly op­posed to what they have done."Mem­bers of the Po­lice So­cial and Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion are protest­ing the five per cent wage in­crease of­fered by Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer Stephanie Lewis and have since raged war on the Gov­ern­ment with sick­outs, one of which has been card­ed to be­gin next week.Warn­er said: "Thank God the army is stand­ing by, I have more sol­diers stand­ing by."What I'm go­ing to do now is to make sure at every lev­el of ser­vice to the pub­lic we have staff to pro­vide back­up strength for con­tin­gen­cies like this."