KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Khadi­jah Ameen has as­sured Na­tion­al Pro­gramme for the Up­keep of Pub­lic Spaces (NPUPS) work­ers that their out­stand­ing salaries will be paid soon.

For weeks, NPUPS work­ers have com­plained that de­spite con­tin­u­ing to re­port for du­ty, they have not been paid.

The Op­po­si­tion has al­so called on the Gov­ern­ment to set­tle the out­stand­ing wages.

Ad­dress­ing the is­sue dur­ing a clean-up ex­er­cise at Barataria South Sec­ondary School yes­ter­day, Ameen said the de­lays were a re­sult of an ad­min­is­tra­tive is­sue that is cur­rent­ly be­ing re­solved.

“We have iden­ti­fied what the is­sue is and it’s ad­min­is­tra­tive. It is not the fault of the work­ers or the su­per­vi­sors. What I have done is en­gaged a com­pa­ny to pro­vide ser­vices to do the pay­roll man­age­ment so that it doesn’t re­ly on, where it’s sub­jec­tive to hu­man er­ror. Some of these work­ers had about five fort­nights out­stand­ing. We have cleared that back­log. Some of them might have one or two fort­nights, but I still con­tin­ue to pay in­di­vid­ual at­ten­tion. So we are reach­ing out to the su­per­vi­sors now for them to up­date us, be­cause many of the work­ers have got­ten the bulk of the out­stand­ing monies,” Ameen said.

In ad­di­tion to the salary con­cerns, NPUPS work­ers raised is­sues about the lack of ad­e­quate per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment (PPE).

They al­so told the Min­is­ter that just this week two fe­male work­ers suf­fered mi­nor in­juries af­ter they were struck by ve­hi­cles while car­ry­ing out their du­ties.

Re­spond­ing to their con­cerns, Ameen as­sured them that they will look in­to sourc­ing more PPE gear.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the work­ers al­so called for their con­tracts to be made per­ma­nent un­der the NPUPS pro­gramme.

Ameen said there re­mains a strong need for the NPUPS pro­gramme, not­ing that crews con­tin­ue to car­ry out main­te­nance and beau­ti­fi­ca­tion work across the coun­try and there are a lot of re­quests for dif­fer­ent ar­eas across the coun­try.

She added that she hopes the pro­gramme, which is sched­uled to end on Sep­tem­ber 13, will con­tin­ue.

Her com­ments come af­ter Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der said prison labour would be used to re­place pro­grammes such as NPUPS.

How­ev­er, Ameen said both ini­tia­tives could op­er­ate along­side each oth­er.

“Lis­ten it have rel grass to cut you know. There’s no com­pe­ti­tion. It have re­al grass to cut. We have proven that NPUPS works. Our NPUPS work­ers have shown their per­for­mance, and in var­i­ous min­istries, you have a lot of min­istries who do this type of main­te­nance work. You have MTS in the schools. You have Min­istry of Works do­ing the high­ways and those ma­jor wa­ter cours­es where you have same thing, work­ers cut­ting grass, so there is need to con­tin­ue to have that kind of main­te­nance,” Ameen said.

The Min­is­ter al­so said clean-up ex­er­cis­es are con­tin­u­ing in con­stituen­cies where Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment (MPs) have re­quest­ed NPUPS crews.

She as­sured com­mu­ni­ties that if their area has not yet been tar­get­ed, crews will get there as the ex­er­cise con­tin­ues.