Akash Sama­roo

The Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers’ Union (CWU) is al­leg­ing that the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT) has haem­or­rhaged over $100 mil­lion in the last week due to is­sues with its on­line sys­tems. And the union be­lieves the tim­ing is sus­pi­cious.

On March 14, TSTT in­formed cus­tomers that its web por­tal for on­line bill pay­ments was down due to a “tech­ni­cal is­sue im­pact­ing the com­pa­ny’s abil­i­ty to process pay­ment trans­ac­tions at chan­nel part­ner lo­ca­tions and through its on­line por­tal b-on­line.”

Yes­ter­day, TSTT told Guardian Me­dia that it ex­pects restora­tion of the pay­ment sys­tem “this week” but sought to as­sure cus­tomers that “TSTT has tem­porar­i­ly sus­pend­ed dis­con­nec­tions un­til its sys­tems are back on­line.”

But the CWU be­lieves TSTT is un­der­selling the is­sue and the union’s sec­re­tary gen­er­al Clyde El­der said this is more than the crash­ing of a pay­ment por­tal.

“It’s not the web­site down but TSTT’s net­work is down. I have been told 131 ap­pli­ca­tions have been down for the last week and a half. This is soft­ware where mem­bers of staff can ac­cess dif­fer­ent plat­forms to do their job, for ex­am­ple, there is an app called Stream­line which they use to com­mu­ni­cate with their out­side em­ploy­ees that has been down, so work­ers have not been go­ing out for the last week and a half,” said El­der.

El­der said he be­lieves TSTT grant­ed a mora­to­ri­um on out­stand­ing mo­bile bills be­cause right now, the com­pa­ny’s net­work does not have the abil­i­ty to re­con­nect cus­tomers.

But while the tem­po­rary sus­pen­sion of pay­ments may be good news for some, the CWU said it is a ma­jor wor­ry for work­ers. TSTT re­cent­ly re­port­ed loss­es of $453 mil­lion and has ini­ti­at­ed talks on re­struc­tur­ing the com­pa­ny. El­der said from the union’s cal­cu­la­tions, the net­work is­sue will give the com­pa­ny more lever­age to con­tin­ue the nar­ra­tive that the com­pa­ny, in its cur­rent state, is un­sus­tain­able.

“The dai­ly loss­es right now in terms of what is hap­pen­ing is in the vicin­i­ty of about $16.8 mil­lion. Now what is go­ing to hap­pen now and then they will say they didn’t get to col­lect the type of mon­ey they want­ed in 2022, there­fore they will sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly chan­nel cus­tomers to go to Am­plia.”

Guardian Me­dia asked TSTT how much mon­ey has been lost in un­col­lect­ed pay­ments in the last week but re­ceived no an­swer. El­der said TSTT’s man­age­ment has been mak­ing de­ci­sions where it seems as if they in­ten­tion­al­ly want cus­tomers to switch to Am­plia Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Lim­it­ed, which is al­so TSTT-owned. El­der said the com­pa­ny re­cent­ly took a po­si­tion to not re­new cer­tain on­line li­cens­es and pro­tec­tions for its on­line plat­forms.

“And even if they say this web­site is­sue is not the work­er’s fault, at the end of the day the work­ers will pay for this faux pas. The plan is for TSTT’s demise, for the work­ers to not have a union and they now go­ing to trans­fer all of that to Am­plia, which will be seen as the knight in shin­ing ar­mour.”

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