Petrotrin was yes­ter­day found to have act­ed in bad faith by fail­ing to meet with the Oil­fields Work­ers’ Trade Union about the com­pa­ny’s clo­sure.

The rul­ing was de­liv­ered fol­low­ing de­lib­er­a­tion by In­dus­tri­al Court pres­i­dent Deb­o­rah Thomas-Fe­lix and mem­bers Al­bert Ab­erdeen, Jan­ice Christo­pher-Nicholls and Azeem Mo­hammed, but read out by Ab­erdeen in the Thomas-Fe­lix’s ab­sence.

How­ev­er, while the rul­ing agreed that “the com­pa­ny did not, in good faith, treat and ne­go­ti­ate with the union for the pur­pose of col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing as re­quired by law” it de­nied the OW­TU’s ap­pli­ca­tion to de­bar Petrotirn from con­tin­u­ing to ter­mi­nate work­ers.

How­ev­er, the OW­TU still claimed vic­to­ry as the rul­ing proved the com­pa­ny had bro­ken the law.

“The union is vin­di­cat­ed to­day be­cause we have al­ways been say­ing that the com­pa­ny broke the law. We had a mem­o­ran­dum of agree­ment reg­is­tered with the court and by virtue of that reg­is­tra­tion be­came an or­der of the court, the com­pa­ny vi­o­lat­ed that mem­o­ran­dum of agree­ment,” OW­TU pres­i­dent gen­er­al An­cel Ro­get said af­ter­wards.

“They failed to meet and treat with the union in ac­cor­dance with the pro­vi­sions that were set out in that mem­o­ran­dum of agree­ment. To­day we feel thor­ough­ly vin­di­cat­ed and so we call on the com­pa­ny to fol­low the or­der of the court.”

The In­dus­tri­al Court has or­dered that Petrotrin meets with the union to dis­cuss “is­sues re­lat­ed to the terms and con­di­tions of em­ploy­ment of the work­ers for which the com­pa­ny had a du­ty to dis­cuss with the union.”

These is­sues are:

• What cri­te­ria is used for the re­hir­ing process

• What is the pro­posed struc­ture of the Com­pa­ny

• Pen­sion and med­ical plans of the work­ers

• Work­ers’ sav­ings plan and oth­er ben­e­fits

• Com­pu­ta­tion of ter­mi­na­tion pack­ages

These meet­ings are to take place dai­ly from 9.30 am on No­vem­ber 20th and 26th at the com­pa­ny’s premis­es or at a mu­tu­al­ly agreed venue. The com­pa­ny was al­so or­dered to pay the max­i­mum fine of $4,000 by No­vem­ber 23.

Ro­get added, “The union is not com­fort­able with that but that is the law and just as we would not be com­fort­able with that but still be pre­pared to up­hold the or­der of the court, we call on them to do the same thing.”

He al­so said the re­cent an­nounce­ment from Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley con­cern­ing a tax ex­emp­tion on Petrotrin work­ers’ sev­er­ance pack­ages would al­so need to be dis­cussed.

“Those is­sues are go­ing to be ex­am­ined as we sit with the com­pa­ny to de­ter­mine the ex­tent of the com­pen­sa­tion pack­ages for tak­ing away their jobs. When we ex­am­ine it in its to­tal­i­ty, we will be able to say how ben­e­fi­cial or how not ben­e­fi­cial those is­sues are to work­ers who to­day are with­out a job,” Ro­get said.