The Oil­field Work­ers Trade Union(OW­TU) now has a head­quar­ters in To­ba­go which the union built with its own funds. This three-storey build­ing lo­cat­ed at Young Street in Scar­bor­ough was com­mis­sioned on Fri­day.

Dur­ing the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny, Pres­i­dent of the union, An­cel Ro­get, said in spite of re­cent spec­u­la­tions over the union’s fi­nanc­ing, the OW­TU was ca­pa­ble of hold­ing its own fi­nan­cial­ly.

Al­lud­ing to ques­tions be­ing raised about the union's fi­nances af­ter it won a $700 mil­lion bid to buy the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery, Ro­get said, in this case, the union fi­nanced the project to con­struct the build­ing.

“You know every­body wants to know where we get the mon­ey from, who fi­nanc­ing us and all this set of bac­cha­nal and base­less talk...thank almighty God and our found­ing fa­thers that the oil­field work­ers is a well-re­sourced union,” Ro­get said.

“We did not go to the bank, we didn’t go to any fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion. I want to make that abun­dant­ly clear, that we would have gone to the gen­er­al coun­cil and got­ten ap­proval from them to bor­row from our­selves to con­struct this build­ing.”

Ro­get said the con­struc­tion was done dur­ing a dif­fi­cult fi­nan­cial pe­ri­od for the union.

“Along the way came a ma­jor at­tack on the OW­TU on our main rev­enue stream, some­body de­cid­ed that they should let the sky fall on the OW­TU.”

He said the clo­sure of Petrotrin sig­nif­i­cant­ly af­fect­ed the union as one-third of its mem­ber­ship was put on the bread­line. He said the loss af­fect­ed the rate of con­struc­tion of the To­ba­go build­ing.

"Could you imag­ine at a time like now where we re­ly on the dues for the rev­enue and then have one-third of our mem­ber­ship gone?" the trade union leader asked.

He said de­spite the chal­lenges, the union was able to per­se­vere and com­plete the build­ing as they felt it was im­por­tant for To­bag­o­ni­ans.

He said the union re­alised that work­ers in To­ba­go do not know their rights as much as their Trinidad coun­ter­parts.

"We feel that with the cur­rent cli­mate it was im­por­tant that the peo­ple of To­ba­go re­ceive the same lev­el of rep­re­sen­ta­tion as our com­rades in Trinidad. Our vi­sion for Trinidad is to put To­ba­go up, equal, right and cen­tre with Trinidad," Ro­get said.

The build­ing is named af­ter Alphon­so Philbert Theophilus "Far­go" James, one of To­ba­go’s first politi­cians and trade union­ists.