Originally published in the Sunday Guardian by a Guest Author and was republished by the Energy Chamber.
TSTT’s decision to retrench over 500 workers (and a promise of more to come from the company’s non-unionised and senior employees) will come as no surprise to those who follow the parlous state of many of T&T’s state-owned companies.
After all, for decades they have been stuffed with more staff than needed, often paid at a higher rate than those in the private sector, plus considerable additional perks, despite appalling productivity and work ethic.
Let’s be clear – it is never good to see someone losing a job, especially at difficult times. But what we are seeing, first with Petrotrin, now with TSTT, is a much-needed adjustment to a reality politicians (from all sides of the political spectrum), union leaders and society in general avoided for decades: most of our economy, especially the state sector, is out of synch with what is happening with labour markets around the world.
Let’s be even clearer – the high wages and low productivity wild party has been over for quite a while. It’s just that we pretended that this wasn’t the case, forever inebriated by the easy petrodollars of the good old days.
Unsurprisingly, union leaders are and will continue to cry foul, claiming that this is just another cruel and crude act by the state, as TSTT’s main shareholder, to make workers pay for management’s errors.
There is no doubt that TSTT’s problems, just like Petrotrin’s, are linked to historically poor management. But their errors included allowing the company to become bloated over time, whilst giving in to unrealistic pay deals with the Communication Workers’ Union.
Yes, mistakes were made, but allowing them to persist would be just another act of mismanagement, not the other way round.
Some of the figures coming out of TSTT are appalling but not surprising. It states that its revenue per employee is US$ 177,000, when industry benchmark stands at US$ 400,000; and whilst the industry benchmark for payroll costs is around 15% of revenue, TSTT’s wages gobble up double that.
On top of that, TSTT has been avoiding the brutal reality of the telecoms sector faced by companies all over the world. Unlike TSTT, these companies, especially former state monopolies, have had to deal with the realities of competition and technology changes to stay in the game.
BT, Britain’s former state monopoly, famously enacted one of the country’s largest single downsizing in history when, in the early 90s, it sent home nearly 20,000 staff. That wasn’t enough and it continued to restructure over the past decades. Earlier this year, it announced it would be shedding over 10% of its workforce, totalling 13,000 posts over three years (mostly in back office and management areas) to further reduce costs.
There is a big question to why the state needs to run businesses – usually at considerable expense to the taxpayer – but, if they are to stay, they must be better run. Stuffing state companies with staff and make taxpayers pay for that is neither fair nor wise.
Workers from the private sector should also wise up to this and take it up with their union leaders. After all, in the name of workers’ unity, they seem happy to see taxes paid by their members being happily wasted in the state sector.
They should also be as shocked as anybody else with statements such as the one made a few days ago by Public Service Association leader, Watson Duke, demanding that all the 80,000 plus workers he represents are paid a tax-free lump sum of $15,000 by the end of the year.
First, the basic maths. If the government were to give in to the demand, it would need to find more than $1.2 billion from its coffers for this one-off Christmas gift.
There would be only two ways to find the money.
One would be for the government to borrow more (and all those living in T&T would pay for the gift over many years to come) or it could find the money from within the current budget.
That would be easy, as long as the government completely closed down four ministries (and sent its workers home): the Ministry of Foreign and Caricom Affairs, the Ministry of Community Development, Culture and Arts, the Ministry of Sport and Youth Affairs and the Ministry of Labour. Alternatively, Mr Duke no doubt would be more than happy to convince his fellow Tobagonians that a cut of over half of the House of Assembly’s budget could be justifiable to pay for the lump sum he wants.
There is no doubt that the claim is not serious as the cost to the country’s already stretched public purse would be unacceptable. But what Mr Duke’s latest headline-grabbing claims highlight is, again, how ill-prepared our union leaders are for the modern world. And how they seem to be keener on demagogic slogans and claims than a serious, realistic and sound debate about the future of the country’s workforce and how it can win in a fiercely competitive global market.
His latest soundbite jars even more at times we are seeing painful – but necessary – changes to state enterprises such as Petrotrin and, now, TSTT.
Union leaders have a key role to play, together with business and government, to radically improve the skill levels of the workforce, to attract more and better jobs and activities to Trinidad and Tobago, to improve our poor productivity and work discipline and to build on the dream of those who fought hard for freedom and independence.
Above all, if our union leaders wise up, they can help shape the workforce of the future, as the whole world, not only T&T, grapple with the impact on labour just as the technology revolution moves up another gear through artificial intelligence. This doesn’t equal keeping every job, at any cost. But it will help offset the impact of the inevitable changes we face as we wake up to the reality and realise the world is rapidly moving on and leaving us behind.