The Oil­field Work­ers Trade Union (OW­TU) be­lieves that sev­er­al trainee work­ers are be­ing asked to help com­plete projects ahead of the up­com­ing elec­tion sea­son.

Ad­dress­ing a me­dia con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, first vice pres­i­dent ofthe OW­TU Pe­ter Burke ex­pressed his con­cerns af­ter 22 trainees were asked to re­port to the pub­lic light­ing de­part­ment in Re­form Vil­lage, Gas­par­il­lo last week.

“All these trainees would have been asked to re­port to the pub­lic light­ing de­part­ment so that the street lights at play­grounds and so on would be lit in the run-up to the elec­tions. Not on­ly lo­cal gov­ern­ment but al­so the Gen­er­al Elec­tions,” said Burke at the OW­TU of­fice on Hen­ry Street.

He said the union was con­cerned that these trainees would be placed “in the deep end” as many of them had not fin­ished their train­ing and in par­tic­u­lar had not done the req­ui­site mod­ules to un­der­take live line work, which he claimed they may be ex­posed to in the street light­ing pro­gramme.

Burke said the mod­ule was a part of a re­vised train­ing sched­ule im­ple­ment­ed by T&TEC af­ter five deaths in the space of 11 months span­ning Sep­tem­ber 2011 to Au­gust 2012 in­volv­ing T&TEC work­ers. One of those work­ers, Burke said, was an ap­pren­tice, who had not been suf­fi­cient­ly trained.

When con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, Gen­er­al Man­ag­er of T&TEC Kelvin Ram­sook said the trainees were not re­moved from their train­ing pro­gramme but were in­deed as­signed to that unit to un­der­go field train­ing.

“So they are in train­ing, and they are con­tin­u­ing their train­ing in street light­ing,” said Ram­sook, who ex­plained that the trainees had been with the com­pa­ny for over two years.

“They have class­room ses­sions and then they put them out there in terms of the ac­tu­al field­work and so on to pair along­side the ex­ist­ing re­sources of course with full su­per­vi­sion,” he said.