Lee An­na Ma­haraj

leean­na.ma­haraj@guardian.co.tt

Work­ers from Caribbean Dock­yard and En­gi­neer­ing Ser­vices Lim­it­ed (Cari­doc) de­liv­ered a let­ter to the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port yes­ter­day seek­ing a meet­ing on June 1 to dis­cuss job se­cu­ri­ty. This fol­lows the com­pa­ny’s de­ci­sion to fur­loughed 130 work­ers for 90 days.

Some of the work­ers said the an­nounce­ment shocked them and they ac­cused man­age­ment of not putting a plan in place.

“I’ve been em­ployed with this com­pa­ny for the last 23 years. I am a crane op­er­a­tor, my salary is a very small salary. I ded­i­cat­ed my whole life to this com­pa­ny, and to know now that this hap­pened is a se­ri­ous thing, to know what step for­ward I go­ing to take, I don’t know,” said Devin­dra See­tal­dass, a fa­ther of three.

“I have chil­dren to send to school, I have bills to pay, loans to pay. There’s just one more pay to come in, that is the first of June and af­ter that, it’s three months to strug­gle,” said John Theodore, a health and safe­ty of­fi­cer in Cari­doc’s Fire De­part­ment.

Theodore said he had been em­ployed at the com­pa­ny for more than ten years.

The let­ter was de­liv­ered to the min­istry’s head­quar­ters on Rich­mond Street and Lon­don Street by Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al of the Sea­men and Wa­ter­front Work­ers Trade Union (SWW­TU) Pe­ter Mor­ris who said he is hope­ful that the min­istry will re­spond with­in a week.

“The main goal here is to pre­vent loss of em­ploy­ment. The is­sue of sev­er­ance pay­ment is off the ta­ble for us. Job se­cu­ri­ty is a pri­or­i­ty, we al­so out­lined in the let­ter that we are will­ing to col­lab­o­rate with the gov­ern­ment in hav­ing a prof­itable, suc­cess­ful or­ga­ni­za­tion go­ing for­ward be­cause his­tor­i­cal­ly, Cari­doc has car­ried the bur­den of main­tain­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go’s sea bridge ves­sels, and they are the low­est paid mar­itime work­ers in the area, weld­ing, all as­pects of trade.

“The high­est salary down there is $37 an hour for a su­per­vi­sor, so we could imag­ine what are the salaries for the welders and car­pen­ters and so on, in this time with an ever-in­creas­ing cost of liv­ing,” Mor­ris said.

In Par­lia­ment on Wednes­day, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said Gov­ern­ment had no plans to sell Cari­doc as the com­pa­ny has an im­por­tant role in the fu­ture of the na­tion’s econ­o­my. The work­ers said had took no is­sue with Row­ley’s state­ment and do not plan to con­test it. How­ev­er, they re­stat­ed their de­sire to con­tin­ue serv­ing the na­tion.