Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley says that the Gov­ern­ment will not be cut­ting the salaries of the Com­mu­ni­ty-based En­vi­ron­men­tal, Pro­tec­tion, and En­hance­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (CEPEP) em­ploy­ees. How­ev­er, he said, for the pe­ri­od that they are home dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, they will re­ceive two-thirds of their salary.

"They will now get it as a grant like oth­er peo­ple who have lost their means. So what they are get­ting is not 3/4 of their salary. It was not put to you prop­er­ly. It is not a cut in salary. It is that the pro­gramme has been shut down as we don’t want them out there. While the pro­gramme has been shut down, they get a grant," he said while speak­ing at the COVID-19 me­dia brief­ing at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann’s, on Sat­ur­day.

The PM, ex­plain­ing why the Gov­ern­ment made this de­ci­sion, said "If we had shut the pro­gramme down and say ok, let them go to the so­cial sup­port min­istry for the grants, all that would have done is send 10,000 peo­ple to the min­istry to cre­ate more prob­lems. We know who those peo­ple are as we have them in a pro­gramme. So they are get­ting their grants through that pro­gramme.”

The Min­istry of Rur­al and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment in a me­dia re­lease on Fri­day clar­i­fied the po­si­tion of the min­istry fol­low­ing an ear­li­er re­lease by CEPEP, say­ing that there was a 33 per cent salary cut.

In the re­lease, CEPEP stat­ed that dur­ing the month­ly meet­ings of CEPEP's Board of Di­rec­tors on May 26, a de­ci­sion was tak­en by the Board to tem­porar­i­ly re­duce the man­age­ment fees of con­trac­tors and their work­ers. The de­ci­sion took ef­fect on Fri­day.

CEPEP in its re­lease said that while the de­ci­sion was “con­tentious”, it di­rect­ly pro­tects the wel­fare of work­ers as there will be no job loss­es.

CEPEP al­so said the de­ci­sion was tak­en to re­duce the pe­ri­od of work to four hours per day, re­duce the teams’ by 50 per cent so that each work­er will work two days a week and their salaries will be re­duced by 33.3 per cent.

The min­istry's re­lease stat­ed, "While we ap­pre­ci­ate and un­der­stand the im­por­tance that these work­ers play in the main­te­nance of our en­vi­ron­ment, we chose to fol­low the di­rec­tive of our pub­lic health of­fi­cials, to safe­guard their lives and in keep­ing with the na­tion­al ef­fort to pre­vent the spread of the Nov­el Coro­n­avirus. This de­ci­sion took ef­fect on May 17, 2021. Fol­low­ing the shut­down of said field op­er­a­tions, it should be not­ed that these em­ploy­ees will re­ceive a salary grant equal to two-thirds of the nor­mal wages af­ford­ed to them by the com­pa­ny, al­though they are not work­ing in the field at this time.”

The min­istry said CEPEP has over 9,000 field work­ers which com­prise con­trac­tors, op­er­a­tors and labour­ers who are ex­posed dai­ly, as es­sen­tial san­i­ta­tion work­ers.

The me­dia re­lease quot­ed Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Kaz­im Ho­sein as say­ing: "COVID-19 is not a joke and we must look out for those who work hard to en­sure our com­mu­ni­ties are clean and safe. We must do our part in the na­tion­al pub­lic health ef­fort. To­geth­er, we will win this fight and soon we will re­turn to a sense of nor­mal­cy but for now, we must do what is nec­es­sary to pro­tect the lives of all cit­i­zens.”

In Jan­u­ary, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert had said that there was no in­ten­tion “at this time” to re­duce the Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme (URP) and CEPEP pro­grammes, es­pe­cial­ly in the cur­rent pan­dem­ic en­vi­ron­ment since it is some peo­ple’s sole source of in­come.

He was re­ply­ing to In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Am­ri­ta De­onar­ine’s query on pos­si­ble changes in the pro­grammes and oth­ers.