Joshua Seemu­n­gal

Thou­sands of pub­lic sec­tor work­ers flood­ed the streets of Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day.

How­ev­er, rather than re­port­ing to their of­fices for work, many of them marched in protest of the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer’s of­fer of a two per cent in­crease in salaries over eight years.

The march, led by the Na­tion­al Trade Union Cen­tre of Trinidad and To­ba­go, be­gan at Memo­r­i­al Park short­ly af­ter 10.30 am and end­ed more than three hours lat­er on the Bri­an Lara Prom­e­nade.

As pub­lic ser­vants made their way around the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah and down Alexan­dra Street to their first stop—the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer’s of­fice, they chant­ed “two per cent? No way” and “Come down from there, Row­ley and Im­bert.”

There were sev­er­al oth­er chants that tar­get­ed Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley and Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert that were too pro­fane to re­peat in writ­ing.

Many of the pro­tes­tors blamed Dr Row­ley and Im­bert for what they said was the suf­fer­ing of the pop­u­la­tion.

Some called on the Gov­ern­ment to call an ear­ly elec­tion, say­ing they were un­sat­is­fied with the rep­re­sen­ta­tion be­ing of­fered.

“The stan­dard of liv­ing is dis­gust­ing. It’s poor. I mean, we can’t be­lieve that 1.5 mil­lion peo­ple in this coun­try with so much re­sources could be suf­fer­ing like that,” a pro­test­er, who gave his name on­ly as Don, said.

“Pres­sure for every­body. That is ad­van­tage to the poor peo­ple. How could these peo­ple live on this kind of mon­ey? So you ain’t giv­ing me noth­ing and I must live? Some­thing is mad in this coun­try…These are the dev­il self….This is the dev­il self,” Clement Reyes said while point­ing to a pic­ture de­pict­ing the Prime Min­is­ter as a vam­pire.

When the pro­tes­tors ar­rived at CPO Dr Daryl Din­di­al’s of­fice, they chant­ed for him to come down.

Even­tu­al­ly, a mem­ber of the CPO’s staff came down to col­lect a let­ter from Na­tion­al Union of Gov­ern­ment and Fed­er­at­ed Work­ers pres­i­dent-gen­er­al James Lam­bert.

Lam­bert de­clined to say what his de­mands were, but said that they were go­ing to de­mand a bet­ter of­fer than the two per cent that was pre­sent­ed as a first of­fer.

“We cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly de­nounce this two per cent in­crease. We say go back to the ne­go­ti­at­ing ta­ble and re-ne­go­ti­ate a bet­ter liv­ing wage,” Amal­ga­mat­ed Work­ers Union gen­er­al sec­re­tary Cas­san­dra Tom­my-Dabreao said.

From the CPO’s Alexan­dra Street Of­fice, the pub­lic ser­vants pro­ceed­ed to the Er­ic Williams Fi­nance Com­plex in down­town Port-of-Spain.

It’s like­ly that the stand­off be­tween the Gov­ern­ment and the unions rep­re­sent­ing pub­lic sec­tor work­ers will have to be set­tled there.

Un­til then, it seems like­ly that yes­ter­day’s march will not be the last protest ac­tion pub­lic sec­tor work­ers will un­der­take.

The Gov­ern­ment said yes­ter­day that while some pub­lic sec­tor work­ers were ab­sent from du­ty, things were put in place to pre­vent its ser­vices from be­ing af­fect­ed.

Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day on how the protest ac­tion af­fect­ed the op­er­a­tions of min­istries, Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion Allyson West said, “We did not get stats from many min­istries. Of those that we did get, their num­bers were not sig­nif­i­cant­ly af­fect­ed and the heads were not able to say on short no­tice how many of the few that were miss­ing were out as a re­sult of the call to protest as op­posed to COVID, oth­er sick leave, pre-ap­proved va­ca­tion or ca­su­al days, or the pen­chant of our na­tion­als to turn long week­ends in­to even longer ones.”