Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go moved ahead with re­struc­tur­ing plans on Tues­day by re­trench­ing 468 work­ers, a move now tem­porar­i­ly stayed by an In­dus­tri­al Court in­junc­tion ini­ti­at­ed by the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers Union.

This, how­ev­er, is but a tem­po­rary re­prieve, as the court can­not re­scind the process and, in any event, the union’s ma­jor ar­gu­ment is one of a pro­ce­dure, in terms of a 45-day no­tice of im­pend­ing re­trench­ment not be­ing fol­lowed.

CWU boss Clyde El­der would not have been in the dark on this im­pend­ing ac­tion ei­ther, giv­en that this was the sec­ond time in un­der four years that the com­pa­ny has tak­en such ac­tion, which it con­tin­ues to deem as crit­i­cal for its sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Back in No­vem­ber 2018, fac­ing back-to-back an­nu­al rev­enue de­clines and sad­dled with a $1.8 bil­lion debt bur­den un­der then-CEO Dr Ronald Wal­cott, TSTT al­so sent home 503 work­ers, not­ing that this was the first phase of a sus­tain­abil­i­ty plan which fore­cast more cuts go­ing ahead.

In fact, it is im­por­tant to note that Wal­cott said then that the com­pa­ny was at an in­flex­ion point where it was tran­si­tion­ing from a tra­di­tion­al lega­cy com­pa­ny to be­ing a provider of mo­bile, broad­band and ICT ser­vices to lead the coun­try’s eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment.

How­ev­er, al­most four years on and the com­pa­ny is ini­ti­at­ing fur­ther re­trench­ment but is still in the same dire po­si­tion, hav­ing not sig­nif­i­cant­ly ad­dressed the op­er­a­tional is­sues to turn its rev­enue loss around, de­spite hav­ing boast­ed of sev­er­al ma­jor in­vest­ment ini­tia­tives in this pe­ri­od, in­clud­ing 5G, which it claimed would give it a com­pet­i­tive edge in the mar­ket.

In its lat­est ar­gu­ment, the com­pa­ny is again cit­ing a rev­enue loss in the fi­nan­cial year end­ed March 31, 2021, of $453 mil­lion, cit­ing the pan­dem­ic, eco­nom­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal fac­tors as be­ing at the core of its poor per­for­mance.

Of course, the com­pa­ny, like oth­er state en­ti­ties, is sad­dled by some of the ob­vi­ous is­sues, chief of which is a huge wage bill, fed, as the pub­lic is all too fa­mil­iar with, by the job for the boys and girls syn­drome that oc­curs from hav­ing to fol­low ill-ad­vised and un­sus­tain­able man­dates from rul­ing gov­ern­ments over the years.

This lega­cy is why the com­pa­ny has now had to re­trench al­most 1,000 work­ers in the four-year pe­ri­od when a glob­al eco­nom­ic slump and now the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has seen in­fla­tion soar and made life hard­er for the av­er­age cit­i­zen. Hun­dreds of work­ers and their fam­i­lies now face a fu­ture of un­cer­tain­ty, where there are few al­ter­na­tive job op­por­tu­ni­ties on the mar­ket.

On that note, TSTT is thus un­like­ly to turn its course around suf­fi­cient­ly enough to re­turn to its glo­ry days when it held a mo­nop­oly and is now be­ing out­ma­noeu­vred by small­er and more in­no­v­a­tive com­pa­nies quick­ly gain­ing big­ger pieces of the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions pie.

As such, no mat­ter what the CWU does in court, it will not be able to save the work­ers list­ed for ter­mi­na­tion.

This me­dia house thus hopes that new CEO Lisa Agard and the Cab­i­net sub-com­mit­tee led by Camille Robin­son-Reg­is, ap­point­ed in March this year and tasked with re­view­ing the com­pa­ny and mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions on its fu­ture, have a fea­si­ble plan go­ing for­ward to re­vive its for­tunes and save the jobs of em­ploy­ees who sur­vive this lat­est ac­tion.