Gail Alexan­der

Dig­i­cel T&T Ltd has made ef­forts to get the 126 em­ploy­ees who will be re­trenched on May 10 in­tro­duced to Busi­ness Process Out­sourc­ing (BPO) agents, or busi­ness­es that al­ready ex­ist in T&T and are ex­pand­ing, says Trade Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon.

Gopee-Scoon, act­ing as Gov­ern­ment Sen­ate leader, made the com­ment in re­sponse to UNC Sen­a­tor Wade Mark’s query, fol­low­ing Dig­i­cel’s de­ci­sion to re­trench work­ers, whether that de­ci­sion was done in ac­cor­dance with the Re­trench­ment and Sev­er­ance Ben­e­fits Act (RS­BA).

Gopee-Scoon said by let­ter dat­ed March 27, 2023, Dig­i­cel’s chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Abra­ham Smith in­formed the Labour Min­is­ter of the com­pa­ny’s de­ci­sion to re­trench 126 em­ploy­ees as they had be­come “sur­plus to its re­quire­ments.”

She said Dig­i­cel, act­ing with­in the RS­BA, gave no­tice that ef­fec­tive May 10, 2023, it in­tends to re­trench 126 em­ploy­ees. The com­pa­ny gave 45 days’ no­tice which com­menced on March 27, 2023.

“Each of the af­fect­ed em­ploy­ees shall re­ceive sev­er­ance pack­ages to­geth­er with all ter­mi­nal ben­e­fits due to them,” Gopee-Scoon added.

On whether Gov­ern­ment might as­sist, Gopee-Scoon said she imag­ined the em­ploy­ees are very young peo­ple who by now would have re­ceived some ex­pe­ri­ence work­ing at Dig­i­cel in large­ly call-cen­tre op­er­a­tions.

She said In­vestTT has been work­ing on ex­pand­ing this par­tic­u­lar in­dus­try—(BPOS) in­dus­try —and had made sev­er­al strides.

“Al­ready, I’m aware Dig­i­cel has made ef­forts to have these par­tic­u­lar peo­ple in­tro­duced to the oth­er BPO agents or busi­ness­es that al­ready ex­ist in T&T and which are in ex­pan­sion mode, so that these young peo­ple can have the op­por­tu­ni­ty. But they’ll have to go through the nec­es­sary hir­ing process,” she said.

“In any event, this al­so pro­vides an op­por­tu­ni­ty and is an open­ing for the new BPOs that will come on stream short­ly. There are sev­er­al com­ing on stream that have been ne­go­ti­at­ed through In­vestTT and es­pe­cial­ly with the ex­pan­sion of our spe­cial eco­nom­ic zones, we’ll be open­ing the door to even more BPOs com­ing to T&T.”

Gopee-Scoon said apart from the fact that Dig­i­cel would have ex­posed the work­ers to the oth­er agen­cies to which they may ap­ply at In­vestTT, the Gov­ern­ment could al­so sup­ply that in­for­ma­tion.

She said with Dig­i­cel, hav­ing in­tro­duced the work­ers to the oth­er BPOs sec­tor or­gan­i­sa­tions lo­cal­ly, In­vestTT would be open to any com­mu­ni­ca­tion about the oth­er pos­si­bil­i­ties for op­por­tu­ni­ties.