Ke­jan Haynes

Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley is tak­ing a lot of heat on­line for say­ing the coun­try’s pub­lic ser­vice didn’t have the in­fra­struc­ture or the dis­ci­pline to work from home. He was speak­ing at a post bud­get press con­fer­ence in the Par­lia­ment on Mon­day. 

Com­ment­ing on the in­crease in fu­el prices Row­ley sug­gest­ed chang­ing dri­ving habits could re­duce fu­el con­sump­tion. He said, “A sim­ple choice, like choos­ing when you trav­el could save your fu­el bill. If you get in that traf­fic at a par­tic­u­lar hour for no good rea­son and crawl­ing to Port of Spain from San­gre Grande. You burn your burnt up fu­el. And if you had cho­sen to go at a dif­fer­ent time, you wouldn't have had to burn up.”

When he was asked if this means the pub­lic sec­tor would be look­ing at work from home op­tions he said, “ I don't know that we are suf­fi­cient­ly pre­pared for that to be a ma­jor ini­tia­tive, large­ly be­cause it re­quires cer­tain tech­ni­cal in­fra­struc­ture. Un­der cer­tain lev­el of dis­ci­pline, this is Trinidad eh…and To­ba­go. So we're not ready for a ma­jor work from home pol­i­cy, be­cause some peo­ple don’t re­al­ly work from the of­fice.”

Video of the com­ments was post­ed on­line and re­ceived swift con­dem­na­tion.

“To hear the Prime Min­is­ter of a coun­try ef­fec­tive­ly give a vote of no con­fi­dence in the cit­i­zens of said coun­try’s abil­i­ty to meet the de­mands of a chang­ing work­place land­scape is so in­cred­i­bly dis­heart­en­ing.” one com­menter said. 

Peo­ple were quick to point out that a work from home pol­i­cy was in fact part of the PNM’s 2020 man­i­festo. 

The man­i­festo said the PNM was promis­ing to fa­cil­i­tate “re­mote work­ing and work from home in the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tor. Less Traf­fic. Low­er car­bon foot­print. Mon­ey in your pock­et.”

Oth­ers not­ed the coun­try es­sen­tial­ly ran ef­fec­tive­ly with a work from home pol­i­cy for two years dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. 

For those who dri­ve, and can­not choose when they do so, said it takes a lot of dis­ci­pline to wake up at 5am every day to sit in hours of traf­fic to get to work on time. Row­ley was al­so called out of touch con­sid­er­ing he has a po­lice es­cort every­where he goes. 

Not all dis­agreed with the Prime Min­is­ter though, un­der­stand­ing where he was com­ing from, but try­ing to posit a so­lu­tion. One user said “WFH pro­grams are ex­pos­ing poor work eth­ic, in­stead of scrap­ping WFH pro­grams im­ple­ment mea­sures to mea­sure pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, re­ward it and deal with un­pro­duc­tive work­ers. Stop hold­ing back the progress of the coun­try over back­ward peo­ple.”