Derek Achong

Se­nior Re­porter

derek.achong@guardian.co.tt

The Oil­field Work­ers’ Trade Union (OW­TU) will have to wait to learn the fi­nal fate of its case over the fail­ure of the for­mer board of the now-de­funct Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny of Trinidad and To­ba­go (Petrotrin) to con­sult be­fore mov­ing to shut the com­pa­ny down in 2018. 

Five Lords of the Unit­ed King­dom-based Privy Coun­cil re­served their judg­ment in the union’s ap­peal af­ter hear­ing sub­mis­sions at the UK Supreme Court Build­ing in Lon­don, Eng­land, yes­ter­day. 

In the ap­peal, the union is claim­ing that the lo­cal Court of Ap­peal was wrong to have re­versed a de­ci­sion of the In­dus­tri­al Court to up­hold its in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions of­fence (IRO) against the for­mer State-owned en­er­gy com­pa­ny. 

The case re­lat­ed to a 2018 Mem­o­ran­dum of Agree­ment (MoA) signed be­tween the com­pa­ny and the union, which rep­re­sent­ed ap­prox­i­mate­ly 5,500 work­ers. 

Un­der the MoA, the com­pa­ny agreed to have month­ly meet­ings with the union over the then-planned re­struc­tur­ing of the com­pa­ny due to sig­nif­i­cant debts and high op­er­a­tional costs. 

Sev­er­al months lat­er, the com­pa­ny al­leged­ly found that its fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion was worse than an­tic­i­pat­ed and the re­struc­tur­ing was not vi­able. 

With the ap­proval of the then-gov­ern­ment, the com­pa­ny’s man­age­ment sought to close the com­pa­ny and re­place it with sev­er­al en­ti­ties fo­cus­ing on dif­fer­ent ar­eas of its for­mer busi­ness. 

In No­vem­ber 2018, the com­pa­ny ter­mi­nat­ed its em­ploy­ees af­ter giv­ing no­tice and mak­ing ter­mi­na­tion pay-outs. 

A month be­fore the ter­mi­na­tions, OW­TU filed a com­plaint against the com­pa­ny al­leg­ing that it breached the MoA and the In­dus­tri­al Re­la­tions Act by act­ing in bad faith in tak­ing the de­ci­sion with­out con­sul­ta­tion. 

The In­dus­tri­al Court up­held the IRO. It or­dered the com­pa­ny to pay a $4,000 fine and di­rect­ed it to meet with union of­fi­cials on a dai­ly ba­sis be­fore com­plet­ing the ter­mi­na­tions of the work­ers. 

Re­spond­ing to the ap­peal, Petrotrin’s lawyers,  led by Anand Ram­lo­gan, SC, of Free­dom Law Cham­bers, claimed that the Court of Ap­peal was right to find that the sec­tion of the leg­is­la­tion did not ap­ply, as such deals with col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing and not a com­mer­cial de­ci­sion to shut down the com­pa­ny. 

OW­TU was rep­re­sent­ed by Dou­glas Mendes, SC,  An­tho­ny Bul­lock and Leah Ab­du­lah.

Petrotrin was al­so rep­re­sent­ed by Mo­ham­mud Hafeez-Baig, Jared Ja­groo and Can­dice Ramkhel­wan.