Jensen La Vende

Se­nior Re­porter

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt

Less than a week af­ter teach­ers ac­cept­ed the Gov­ern­ment’s five per cent of­fer for a four-year pe­ri­od, an­oth­er union has ac­cept­ed the of­fer.

Yes­ter­day, the Amal­ga­mat­ed Work­ers’ Union agreed to the of­fer for the pe­ri­od 2020 to 2022. The AWU was one of the first unions to ac­cept a four per cent of­fer by the Gov­ern­ment dur­ing the last rounds of ne­go­ti­a­tions for the years 2014 to 2019.

This was just days af­ter the T&T Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion agreed to a five per cent of­fer for the years 2020 to 2023.

In a me­dia re­lease yes­ter­day, the CPO’s of­fice ex­tend­ed grat­i­tude to the City Cor­po­ra­tion work­ers “for their un­wa­ver­ing ded­i­ca­tion to du­ty.”

Apart from the wage in­crease, the work­ers will ben­e­fit from the con­sol­i­da­tion of the Cost of Liv­ing Al­lowance (CO­LA), ef­fec­tive Oc­to­ber 1, 2023 and oth­er mar­ket rate-based salary ad­just­ments.

The sign­ing yes­ter­day came as the T&T Na­tion­al Nurs­ing As­so­ci­a­tion (TTNNA) met with ethe East­ern Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty (ER­HA) ex­ec­u­tive to dis­cuss a re­mu­ner­a­tion pack­age for health­care work­ers.

The meet­ing came af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young met with TTNNA pres­i­dent Idi Stu­art last Wednes­day. Fol­low­ing that meet­ing, Young in­struct­ed Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer Dr Daryl Din­di­al to com­mence wage ne­go­ti­a­tions with the TTNNA.

Stu­art and the TTNNA met with CEO An­geli­na Ram­per­sad-Pierre and both said the meet­ing was “good.”

Stu­art said, “Some of those pro­pos­als in­clude a band sys­tem where we move away from the salary scale be­cause we are no longer con­sid­ered pub­lic ser­vants; we are con­tract work­ers un­der the re­gion­al au­thor­i­ty; there­fore, a new pay sys­tem needs to be cre­at­ed. So that has been put for­ward. It has been un­der­stood by the ER­HA man­age­ment.

“Ad­di­tion­al­ly, we al­so demon­strat­ed the need for con­tin­u­ous pro­fes­sion­al de­vel­op­ment so nurs­es will al­ways re­main on the cut­ting edge of med­i­cine tech­nol­o­gy and best prac­tice in nurs­ing.”

Stu­art said the sug­ges­tion was made to in­crease pa­ter­ni­ty leave from three days to 14 days. He said over­time in­stead of time back and parental were put for­ward for con­sid­er­a­tion.

Ex­plain­ing his ra­tio­nale, Stu­art said with most of his mem­bers be­ing women who are care­givers, they were forced to use their sick leave to at­tend to per­son­al mat­ters in­volv­ing their wards.

To al­le­vi­ate the bur­den of util­is­ing sick leave for non-med­ical im­por­tant mat­ters, he sug­gest­ed parental leave.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia, Ram­per­sad-Pierre said the meet­ing was pro­duc­tive and the ER­HA mem­bers were “im­pressed” by the pre­sen­ta­tion done by Stu­art and his team.

She says an amend­ed pre­sen­ta­tion would be sent to the ER­HA on Thurs­day, and they will re­spond on or by May 5. Both sides will then meet again on May 8, she said.