Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­ton@guardian.co.tt

More jobs have been lost, this time at the Min­istry of Sport and Youth Af­fairs, as short-term staff see their con­tracts come to an end.

Min­is­ter of Sport and Youth Af­fairs Phillip Watts has de­nied that any em­ploy­ees were dis­missed, in­sist­ing that the con­tracts of short-term work­ers sim­ply ex­pired, even as a late-night email or­der­ing the non-re­new­al of con­tracts sparked out­rage on so­cial me­dia.

“What hap­pened is that per­sons’ con­tracts came to an end on the 31st, and that’s it,” Watts said in an in­ter­view. “We didn’t fire any­body; a con­tract com­ing to an end and fir­ing peo­ple are two dif­fer­ent things. Since I am at that min­istry, we nev­er dis­miss any­one. When peo­ple’s con­tracts come to an end, that’s it.”

The min­is­ter in­sist­ed that most of the af­fect­ed work­ers were on three- or six-month con­tracts and that the “con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tion be­tween the min­istry and the em­ploy­ees sim­ply came to an end”. He could not say how many work­ers were af­fect­ed.

Pub­lic re­ac­tion was swift and an­gry af­ter an in­ter­nal email from Deputy Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary Gabre Je­su Mc­Tair, sent at 8.31 pm on Mon­day, be­gan cir­cu­lat­ing, an­nounc­ing that all short-term staff would not be re­hired across the min­istry.

The email ti­tled “Short Term Con­tract-Min­is­ter’s De­ci­sion re: End of Cur­rent Term of En­gage­ment” in­formed staff that Watts had “de­cid­ed to­day that there will be no re-hir­ing of short-term staff through­out the min­istry once the of­fi­cer’s cur­rent term of en­gage­ment ends”.

It stat­ed that the di­rec­tive was is­sued dur­ing a meet­ing chaired by Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary Reid-Samuel and that it came de­spite “ex­ten­sive jus­ti­fi­ca­tions” made by se­nior of­fi­cials and hu­man re­source teams in favour of re­tain­ing the work­ers.

“At this time, all short-term con­tract em­ploy­ees are ap­proved for tenure at least un­til Oc­to­ber 31, 2025, with on­ly one Sport De­vel­op­ment As­so­ciate ex­tend­ed un­til No­vem­ber 8, 2025,” Mc­Tair wrote.

“PS Reid-Samuel has in­di­cat­ed that the min­is­ter will speak to the Prime Min­is­ter on the mat­ter ... There is no guar­an­tee, how­ev­er, that the guid­ance re­ceived by the min­is­ter will lead to a pos­i­tive out­come.”

The cor­re­spon­dence sent af­ter work­ing hours has fu­elled pub­lic crit­i­cism on­line, with com­menters ac­cus­ing Gov­ern­ment of hypocrisy and “tar­get­ing pub­lic ser­vants un­der the guise of con­tract ex­piry”.

The con­tro­ver­sy comes amid mount­ing po­lit­i­cal ten­sion over wide­spread job loss­es across the pub­lic sec­tor. In Au­gust, Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) PRO Faris Al-Rawi es­ti­mat­ed that 30,000 peo­ple had been fired with­in the first 100 days of the UNC gov­ern­ment tak­ing of­fice.

Ac­cord­ing to Al-Rawi, the cuts in­clud­ed 11,000 CEPEP work­ers, 5,000 forestry work­ers, 5,000 URP work­ers, 400 WASA em­ploy­ees, 1,600 from two Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties, 200 change agents in the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment, 2,800 tem­po­rary HDC work­ers, and ten WASA man­agers, to­talling 26,010 con­firmed job loss­es.