SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

The Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers’ Union (CWU) has start­ed gear­ing up for bat­tle with TSTT, af­ter hear­ing ru­mours that the com­pa­ny in­tends to re­trench 600 em­ploy­ees.

CWU Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al Clyde El­der told CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew host Soyi­ni Grey that those ru­mours were start­ed by Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Lim­it­ed (NEL) chair­man In­grid Lash­ley.

El­der al­leged that Lash­ley made the com­ment some­time in June and al­though the union has writ­ten the com­pa­ny and been told the claims were not true, CWU is get­ting ready to fight.

“For Ms Lash­ley to put some­thing in the pub­lic, say­ing TSTT has em­barked on an­oth­er re­struc­tur­ing ex­er­cise, it means that she has in­for­ma­tion, she is well aware about what she’s talk­ing about and (Sean) Roach (TSTT chair­man) and the com­pa­ny is try­ing to maybe make fools of us and say no, we don’t know what you’re talk­ing about,” El­der said.

But he said this de­nial on­ly serves to bring up bit­ter mem­o­ries of the com­pa­ny’s re­trench­ment of 500 em­ploy­ees in 2018.

“They did the same thing in 2018, they said, ‘No, no, no, noth­ing is go­ing to hap­pen” and less than a month af­ter that, 500 of us, my­self in­clud­ed, was re­trenched,” he said.

El­der said based on that ex­pe­ri­ence, CWU does not ex­pect TSTT to obey good in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions prac­tices.

He said CWU has “burned to learn.”

“Now, we are strate­gis­ing, we are meet­ing with our at­tor­neys, we are meet­ing with oth­er rep­re­sen­ta­tives which I don’t want to say right now, but we are do­ing things to en­sure that this time around, we ei­ther stop it out­right or we mit­i­gate the im­pacts of what is hap­pen­ing this time around. The com­pa­ny has said it is not com­ing, that is their po­si­tion, that is not hap­pen­ing but we do not be­lieve them.”

He said there are mat­ters filed in the In­dus­tri­al Court by the union re­lat­ing to the 2018 re­trench­ment, in­clud­ing a re­quest to have that re­trench­ment ex­er­cise de­clared null and void. How­ev­er, due to the pan­dem­ic and the com­pa­ny’s lack of a re­sponse to the ac­tion, El­der said both mat­ters have been put off un­til March 2022.

He ac­cused TSTT’s man­age­ment of de­lib­er­ate­ly at­tack­ing the CWU.

“They found it nec­es­sary to re­trench me, the Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al (in 2018) and what we are hear­ing is that our cur­rent pres­i­dent, who is now on sec­ond­ment with the union, al­though she will not fit the cri­te­ria to be re­trenched, on­ly to make an ex­am­ple of unions and the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers’ Union and to dri­ve that point home, that they in­tend to re­trench her,” he said.

El­der said the CWU would “fight with their lives” to pro­tect its mem­bers and it­self.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to TSTT man­ag­er of Me­dia and Stake­hold­er Re­la­tions Janelle David for com­ment on El­der’s claims.

David said the union’s con­cerns stemmed from state­ments made by NEL and not TSTT, adding TSTT can­not com­ment on state­ments made by NEL. She said the com­pa­ny has been tak­ing steps to “ad­dress the cost and rev­enue chal­lenges” brought on by changes in tech­nol­o­gy and the pan­dem­ic.

“TSTT is cog­nizant of the tenets of good in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions prac­tice and will not vi­o­late same in any cir­cum­stances,” David wrote in a re­sponse.