Eliz­a­beth Gon­za­les

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

The ver­bal abuse al­le­ga­tions made against Sec­re­tary of Health, Well­ness, and So­cial Pro­tec­tion and Deputy Chief Sec­re­tary Dr Faith Breb­nor, fol­low­ing a meet­ing with Pub­lic Health Ser­vices De­part­ment work­ers on Tues­day morn­ing, have tak­en a new turn. The work­er she al­leged­ly cursed is dis­miss­ing the claims made by his col­leagues.

Trans­port fore­man Michael Au­gus­tine said his col­leagues blew the mat­ter out of pro­por­tion. He in­sist­ed that Breb­nor’s use of ob­scene lan­guage was not meant as an at­tack on him or dis­re­spect to the oth­ers but was part of a ca­su­al con­ver­sa­tion. He said if his col­leagues mis­un­der­stood her tone, they should have asked for clar­i­fi­ca­tion in­stead of go­ing to the me­dia.

“You know when you’re talk­ing ca­su­al­ly to some­body some­times you’ll use a word to ex­press your­self ... right like that. It was not curs­ing any­body,” Au­gus­tine ex­plained.

“I can’t feel of­fend­ed be­cause I was not called out and cursed. She said some­thing us­ing words to ex­press how im­por­tant it is.”

He said Breb­nor spoke in a down-to-earth man­ner and had asked the work­ers to ex­press them­selves freely.

“They blew that out of pro­por­tion be­cause they did not un­der­stand the lev­el in which the per­son was speak­ing,” Au­gus­tine said.

How­ev­er, oth­er work­ers claimed Breb­nor used an ex­ple­tive when they asked about over­time pay­ments and asked if they want­ed her to “pull the mon­ey from up my a**.”

At that point, some of the work­ers said they walked away. An­oth­er work­er in­ter­vened to cau­tion Breb­nor about her lan­guage and the way she spoke to Au­gus­tine dur­ing the meet­ing.

Au­gus­tine said he saw no is­sue with it and be­lieves the fo­cus should be on the plans Breb­nor shared to im­prove work­ing con­di­tions and in­fra­struc­ture rather than the ap­proach and tone she used. He felt he was not dis­re­spect­ed and did not think an apol­o­gy was nec­es­sary.

The meet­ing fo­cused on up­com­ing projects in Sig­nal Hill, in­clud­ing con­struc­tion of a task force build­ing, out­fit­ting of the me­chan­i­cal work­shop, and fi­nal­i­sa­tion of the vec­tor lab.

Au­gus­tine’s col­leagues, how­ev­er, are stand­ing by their claims, in­sist­ing that ob­scene lan­guage in the work­place is a ter­minable of­fence. They said if the sit­u­a­tion had been re­versed, em­ploy­ees would have been fired im­me­di­ate­ly.

One work­er asked: “Does this mean it’s okay for us to give her some good bad word in her a** on her next vis­it? Let me know nah.”