Originally published in the Sunday Guardian by a Guest Author and was republished by the Energy Chamber.
The debate over Petrotrin’s future is fast becoming a choice between a real and a surreal world for Trinidad and Tobago.
The surreal world is so out of touch with people’s reality that OWTU’s leader Ancel Roget urged Petrotrin workers to reject their retrenchment packages because, as he stated, managers ‘are in the belief that you [Petrotrin workers] don’t know money so they throw a little million or two million before you’.
His peer, PSA leader Watson Duke, went one step further, suggesting Petrotrin workers shouldn’t accept anything below $5 million.
Only pampered or out of touch people consider a million or two ‘little’. Mr Roget’s comments were not only offensive to most workers in T&T but also utterly disrespectful to every taxpayer who will be forking out, in one way or another, every cent of these ‘little million or two million’ he finds so pitiful.
Let’s just put these figures into perspective. The country’s minimum wage is set at $15 per hour. Presuming someone works 8 hours a day, all weekdays except public holidays, the minimum wage equals just over $30,000 a year. Yes, it is low and few workers are likely to be earning this amount a year. But this is the reference for wages in the country.
Using the amount as a guide, it would take someone working full time on the minimum age around 33 years to earn Mr Roget’s “little” million. Double that, naturally, to reach his equally “little” two million. Mr Duke’s minimum retrenchment package recommendation equals over 160 years’ worth of pay for someone on the minimum wage.
Let´s be more generous and imagine you are a public servant (and also a taxpayer who will be helping pay for Petrotrin´s retrenchment package). Your salary, as a middle ranking employee, is around $8,000 a month, or $100,000 a year. It would take you ten years to earn that “little million”, or twenty years to get the equally “little” $2 million. And if Mr Duke – your union leader – could get his way, you´d be giving away the equivalent of 50 years of your wages to meet his suggested minimum retrenchment package.
And that is before Petrotrin’s generous severance package’s other benefits in cash and in kind, including two years of health insurance fully paid from the moment the worker leaves the company.
And, in this surreal world, the final cost of the whole process can go higher, especially as some try every delay tactic in the book – including claims at the Industrial Court or questions over plant decommissioning procedures – to frustrate the restructuring plans. Or some seek to compromise Petrotrin’s assets through sabotage.
But there’s hope. Wisely – and unsurprisingly – most in T&T seem to prefer life in the real world, not this illogical, unsustainable, unrealistic and divisive parallel dimension inhabited by some of our union leaders.
The real world is about finding a way to deal with a company that has become an ever-increasing hole in the pocket of its stakeholders, the taxpayer. A business that is unable to stay afloat unless it gets more money from the state at the same time it owes the same government vast sums in unpaid taxes and royalties.
The real world is about those who know they have to work hard to earn a living, often well below Petrotrin’s inflated wages and over-generous benefits. In the real world, one or two million dollars are not seen as little, but money they have to work hard to earn and held accountable for earning those dollars.
The real world is where employees don’t treat their jobs as an easy (and unchecked) source of income whilst they pursue other activities or careers outside the company and feel outraged when the party is over.
The real world is also the one where a major union, the SWWTU, actively seeks to negotiate staff reductions in order to secure the longer term future of the capital’s port in stark contrast with others who deny the inevitable or celebrate when investments and jobs are lost to another country.
The real world is the one that shuns the general (and illegal) strike called by union leaders last month, or refuses to join the not-so-great march from Point-à-Pierre to Port-of-Spain called by the OWTU this past week.
The real world is about working hard to make Trinidad and Tobago more modern and competitive on a global level – the only way to ensure our economy grows at a faster pace to make the whole nation, not just a clique of workers, more successful and prosperous.
Petrotrin is fast becoming a catalyst to another major shift in T&T’s journey. The low support for the OWTU and its campaign to stop the restructuring plans could well be a sign that, as a nation, we are saying ‘enough’ to unrealistic, detached and arrogant union leadership.
For decades, they behaved as if they – not government leaders – managed the country and called the shots. From true representatives of workers’ needs and aspirations, they effectively became political activists without the mandate only elections can provide.
It is clear the majority in T&T have had enough of this myopic and aggressive approach to industrial relations that hurts workers and the nation as whole. No one wants to see people losing their jobs or a national symbol like Petrotrin being under stress.
The real world isn’t always pretty but it allows us to rethink our ways and find new paths for growth. This is the world that, through effort and hard work, we pay our bills. In the surreal world, we just pretend there are no bills to pay and sink ever more deeply into a hole.
The choice is simple and incredibly easy for all - bar a few - to see.