Af­ter ap­prox­i­mate­ly eight years, unions rep­re­sent­ing dai­ly-rat­ed work­ers met with the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer (CPO) yes­ter­day and be­gan dis­cus­sions on ne­go­ti­a­tions.

“The two pe­ri­ods that are out­stand­ing of which we have ne­go­ti­at­ed is 2014 to 2016 and 2017 to 2019,” Na­tion­al Union of Gov­ern­ment and Fed­er­at­ed Work­ers (NUGFW) pres­i­dent gen­er­al James Lam­bert said.

Lam­bert, along with rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Amal­ga­mat­ed Work­ers Union (AWU) and Con­trac­tors and Gen­er­al Work­ers Union (CG­WU) that rep­re­sent em­ploy­ees in Cen­tral and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment and To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA), met with Dr Daryl Din­di­al at #1 Alexan­dra Street, Port-of-Spain for more than four hours.

But wage ne­go­ti­a­tions, cost of liv­ing and oth­er al­lowances were not dis­cussed dur­ing the ses­sion. Ac­cord­ing to Lam­bert, they will wait on the CPO’s pro­pos­al, which should be sent by their next meet­ing.

“He did not dis­close what wages would be, what cost of liv­ing al­lowance would be, or what the oth­er al­lowances would be... so our next meet­ing is sched­uled for the 12th of May, where we will re­spond per­tain­ing to the of­fers that they will make,” Lam­bert said.

Lam­bert, whose union rep­re­sents over 30,000 work­ers, said they want to com­plete the process as quick­ly as pos­si­ble.

“We are say­ing the three unions as long as it is rea­son­able that we can ac­cept,“ he said.

Lam­bert said the CPO al­so in­di­cat­ed that a few al­lowances could be fore­gone at this time but the ones they thought were nec­es­sary were agreed up­on, along with oth­er con­di­tion­al­i­ties and non-cost items.­­—Carisa Lee