KEVON FELMINE

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

With their sav­ings run­ning low, scores of un­em­ployed peo­ple queued out­side TTPost of­fices across the coun­try to sub­mit forms for Gov­ern­ment’s Salary Re­lief Grant amidst the eco­nom­ic woes brought on by the COVID-19 cri­sis.

Many were stressed and a few were op­ti­mistic that the $1,500 grant would car­ry them through, but most were just hop­ing that the cri­sis would be over so they could re­turn to work.

As the Guardian Me­dia crew ar­rived at the TTPost of­fices on Cof­fee Street, San Fer­nan­do, many were too shy or ashamed at hav­ing to de­pend on gov­ern­ment wel­fare for the first time in their lives.

A few weeks ago, South Oropouche me­chan­ic Avin­da Par­tap was em­ployed at a trans­port com­pa­ny, col­lect­ing a salary that was ad­e­quate to sup­port him­self and his wife. Par­tap said while his em­ploy­ers try their best to as­sist work­ers, busi­ness is slow­er be­cause of the COVID shut­down.

“I had a bit of mon­ey put aside and it is start­ing to fin­ish so I have to see about this form here now. I don’t know how long this will work out for.

“My com­pa­ny kind of shut down be­cause of COVID-19. Right now they have es­sen­tial work­ers but they are on call out and the rest of work­ers have to stay home,” Par­tap said.

Based on his sav­ings, he av­er­ages that his fam­i­ly can man­age for the next two months.

“Right now I am de­pend­ing on this mon­ey here. Oth­er than that, I will have to turn in­to a va­grant.”

He was an­noyed, how­ev­er, that Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Board was not ac­cept­ing the ap­pli­ca­tion. When he went to their of­fice along Har­ris Prom­e­nade, he was di­rect­ed to TTPost.

Self-em­ployed cit­i­zens have to wait un­til the Min­istry of Fi­nance rolls out the sec­ond phase of the grants. (See oth­er sto­ry)

But for some who worked as ca­su­al labour in the pri­vate sec­tor, they were dis­ap­point­ed at learn­ing that they could not ap­ply for the grant. This in­clud­ed Ken­rick Singh, a sign tech­ni­cian who was paid per job. Singh said be­cause of this he was not mak­ing NIS con­tri­bu­tion for sev­er­al months and was told he could not ac­cess the grant.

It was a dou­ble wham­my for Singh. First, the com­pa­ny he worked for closed when Gov­ern­ment passed the Pub­lic Health Or­di­nance (CoViD-19 Reg­u­la­tions) which man­dat­ed the clo­sure of non-es­sen­tial ser­vices. Sec­ond­ly, to sup­port his fam­i­ly, Singh took up the job as a PH taxi dri­ver. How­ev­er, Pe­nal po­lice stopped him in a road­block last week and of­fi­cers in­formed him that this source of in­come was il­le­gal. They even took his car’s reg­is­tra­tion num­ber to en­sure he com­plied with the law. How­ev­er, the of­fi­cers gave him the ap­pli­ca­tion form to take to the NIB.

“It is tough. I was work­ing a lit­tle PH on the road but the po­lice told us that we were not al­lowed to do that. It is a $50,000 fine. Out of des­per­a­tion, I said I have to ask some­thing of the Gov­ern­ment ... What­ev­er I had home is fin­ished and I have a wife and two chil­dren so I don’t have a choice. I turn to the Gov­ern­ment now,” Singh said.

He was told to try the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices for food sup­port and oth­er as­sis­tance.

A con­struc­tion labour­er said he lost his job over a month ago and it was hard fi­nan­cial­ly for him and his col­leagues.

“All this go­ing on right now, I mean the lit­tle grant can’t re­al­ly help many peo­ple but at least it can do some­thing.”

While the lines were long in some ar­eas, there was a smooth flow in San Fer­nan­do with ap­pli­cants ob­serv­ing so­cial dis­tanc­ing and mask-wear­ing ad­vice.