Scav­engers who clean the Cen­tral Mar­ket say the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion has been forc­ing them to do two jobs for one salary for over a year.

In a protest at the mar­ket in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, the work­ers say they are giv­ing Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Kaz­im Ho­sein and Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley one week to re­spond to their plight or they are shut­ting down the mar­ket.

Led by shop stew­ard from the Amal­ga­mat­ed Work­ers’ Union, Al­win Jef­frey, the work­ers clapped and sang, call­ing for jus­tice for them­selves.

As they sang, one work­er kept shout­ing, “Mar­ket work­ers mat­ter!”, tak­ing a page from the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment that is cur­rent­ly sweep­ing the globe.

Jef­frey told Guardian Me­dia the scav­engers are paid mea­gre salaries and the ad­di­tion­al re­spon­si­bil­i­ties seem like in­sult piled on­to in­jury.

“They want us to load the garbage trucks, which we are not sup­posed to be do­ing, that is scav­enger/load­ers, we don’t have that in the mar­ket here, that is a dif­fer­ent salary, a dif­fer­ent port­fo­lio, they have us do­ing two jobs for one salary,” Jef­frey said.

He said con­trac­tors have al­so been hired to clean the mar­kets on week­ends- tak­ing away over­time work from dai­ly paid em­ploy­ees.

“We need the Prime Min­is­ter and the Min­is­ter to look in­to what is go­ing on in the mar­ket and through­out the cor­po­ra­tion. They say they are cut­ting down on over­time be­cause of lack of funds but they are giv­ing out con­tracts- they have peo­ple here work­ing now,” he said.

Hold­ing up a 20-ounce soft drink bot­tle filled with a blue liq­uid, Jef­frey claimed that the chem­i­cals giv­en to the work­ers to clean the mar­ket are ‘wa­tered down.’

“When we have to clean the toi­lets and we are ask­ing for clean­ing, this is how we are get­ting it in lit­tle bot­tles and these are the tools we are work­ing with, this is wa­tered down chem­i­cals that they are giv­ing us, the cheap­est…We are giv­ing the au­thor­i­ties a week, by next Mon­day if we can’t get some­body here to as­sist us, we go­ing to have to down tools be­cause it’s over­bear­ing.”

He al­so al­leged that the mar­ket ad­min­is­tra­tors have in­struct­ed work­ers to store rot­ting fish­es and an­i­mal parts in the cold stor­age fa­cil­i­ties for pro­duce.

“Old fish guts, rot­ting fish guts, cow and pig parts, that old and have to throw away, they are stor­ing it among peo­ple’s fresh pro­duce. It has been go­ing on through the COVID, they stopped it for two weeks be­cause the truck came  on two week­ends- but they sent a mes­sage say­ing there wouldn’t have a truck again this week­end, I would like you to be here next Mon­day to see the filth they have stor­ing in the cold stor­age, rot­ting fish and meat.”

Guardian Me­dia con­tact­ed Port of Spain May­or Joel Mar­tinez who said he was not aware that the work­ers had protest­ed at the mar­ket. 

Mar­tinez said he al­so did not know of in­stances where work­ers were re­quired to do two jobs for one salary. He said in­cen­tives of over­time were tak­en ad­van­tage of in the past and be­cause of bud­get re­straints, over­time was al­so cut down.