Pe­ter Christo­pher

Se­nior Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Ef­forts have been made to en­gage the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty con­cern­ing the on­go­ing im­passe over wage ne­go­ti­a­tions at the Port of Port-of-Spain, Sea­men and Wa­ter­front Work­ers Trade Union (SWW­TU) pres­i­dent Michael An­nisette said yes­ter­day.

He was re­spond­ing to a call by Down­town Own­ers and Mer­chants As­so­ci­a­tion (DO­MA) Pres­i­dent Gre­go­ry Aboud for the union to meet with busi­ness lead­ers to find a so­lu­tion to the is­sue af­ter the union claimed the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty had a one-sided view of the sit­u­a­tion. Ma­jor busi­ness cham­bers have called on the gov­ern­ment to ur­gent­ly take what­ev­er ac­tion is nec­es­sary to re­solve the on­go­ing in­dus­tri­al ac­tion caus­ing chaos at the Port of Port-of-Spain.

An­nisette said the union had pre­vi­ous­ly reached out to the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty and met with the Ship­ping As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T and the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Re­gion­al Busi­ness Cham­bers.

“ I just make it the point that we have been ac­tive, and we would have reached out to sev­er­al en­ti­ties to meet with the union so that we could put the is­sues on the ta­ble, so there will be a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of an is­sue that did not start this year,” he said.

“The gen­er­al prin­ci­ple of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, which I un­der­stand is about your car­go, but how do we bal­ance the two to en­sure that the work­ers are treat­ed with the re­spect and dig­ni­ty that they de­serve, and they are paid prop­er wages, but along with that, that we im­ple­ment in­ter­na­tion­al best prac­tice to make the port more at­trac­tive and much more com­pet­i­tive?”

An­nisette al­so re­spond­ed to the DO­MA pres­i­dent’s sug­ges­tion that the tim­ing of the in­dus­tri­al ac­tion could be seen as a self­ish act by the work­ers.

He stressed that apart from seek­ing a 12 per cent salary in­crease for 2014 to 2017, the union is al­so call­ing on the Port Au­thor­i­ty to im­ple­ment the frame­work agree­ment which in­clud­ed a re­vamp of the over­time pay­ment sys­tem at the Port. He ex­plained that week­end work­ers are au­to­mat­i­cal­ly paid over­time and an ad­just­ment to this sys­tem could save the Port $100 mil­lion in costs.

“ We are not blind­ed and short-mind­ed with just this spe­cif­ic is­sue. That is what we are deal­ing with. They are fight­ing for the very fu­ture and sur­vival of the port, and we are speak­ing about ef­fi­cien­cy, pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and sus­tain­abil­i­ty and mak­ing the port com­pet­i­tive. What is wrong with that? I want any busi­nessper­son to tell me what is wrong with that,” said An­nisette.