Bavi­ta Gopaulchan

The pub­lic ser­vice re­turned to full ser­vice on Mon­day, with all work­ers be­ing man­dat­ed to re­turn to their of­fices.

Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA) pres­i­dent Leroy Bap­tiste said work­ers had no is­sues in re­turn­ing to work, es­pe­cial­ly since day­cares have been al­lowed to re­sume ser­vice.

He not­ed that while many had re­spond­ed to the Prime Min­is­ter’s call last Fri­day to come out, there are some who were wait­ing for day­care to be up and run­ning.

“The day­cares would have caused an in­crease in turnout but the full re­al­i­sa­tion on the im­pact of that may be seen lat­er on in this week,” Bap­tiste told Guardian Me­dia.

He could not pro­vide an es­ti­mat­ed fig­ure for how much of the PSA’s 80,000 mem­bers showed up for work yes­ter­day.

The PSA boss not­ed there has been an im­prove­ment in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in the pub­lic sec­tor as work­ers were do­ing a lot more than re­quired.

“There have been of­fices that I have been told that had an in­crease in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty based on the work-from-home arrange­ment. Peo­ple would talk about work­ing longer while at home. The end time to work moved from the tra­di­tion­al 4 pm to all 8 pm, just try­ing to get things done,” Bap­tiste ex­plained.

It’s why he be­lieves a hy­brid sys­tem should be im­ple­ment­ed in the sec­tor.

“Once you could do it and it will not ad­verse­ly af­fect the day-to-day op­er­a­tions it is some­thing that is ought to be ex­plored. You have tech­nolo­gies and COVID has put us in a po­si­tion to ex­plore cre­ative ways in get­ting work done,” he said.

“So, I think that has im­pact­ed pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in a far more ef­fec­tive and ef­fi­cient way that would have been thought about pri­or to COVID-19,” he added.

As for the Prime Min­is­ter’s an­nounce­ment that the pub­lic sec­tor safe zone pol­i­cy will be scrapped, Bap­tiste said he is not sur­prised as “it nev­er made any sense.”

“I think it’s some­thing that didn’t make sense and that has come to end. At some point in time, com­mon sense catch up with the world be­cause it is not on­ly Trinidad and To­ba­go that peo­ple were talk­ing that kind of talk,” Bap­tiste said.

“The re­luc­tance of the peo­ple over­all to be forced in­to do­ing some­thing that doesn’t make sense, it would have had an im­pact on the de­ci­sion,” he al­so not­ed

The pub­lic sec­tor safe zone pol­i­cy was card­ed to come in­to ef­fect on Jan­u­ary 17. How­ev­er, it was ex­tend­ed Feb­ru­ary 17.

Guardian Me­dia spoke with some pub­lic ser­vants in Port-of-Spain on Mon­day. They said they were hap­py to see all of their co-work­ers af­ter al­most two years.

“Not see­ing them for a long time I felt good to­day. We still on a ro­ta­tion so it is not every­body out but still,” a work­er at the Ju­di­cia­ry told Guardian Me­dia.

Asked whether she was con­cerned about the spread of in­fec­tion among her col­leagues, the work­er said they are all tak­ing their own pre­cau­tions such as mask-wear­ing and sani­tis­ing.

Mean­while, work­ers of the Im­mi­gra­tion Di­vi­sion said they have all been out dur­ing the pan­dem­ic as they are con­sid­ered an es­sen­tial ser­vice.