Padarath dismisses CWU protest; insists no 10% wage hike on offer at TSTT

PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­[email protected]

Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Bar­ry Padarath has dis­missed Fri­day’s protest by the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers’ Union (CWU) as po­lit­i­cal the­atre, while main­tain­ing that no 10 per cent wage in­crease was ever of­fered to the union.

Speak­ing dur­ing an in­ter­view on state broad­cast­er TTT Live yes­ter­day, Padarath chal­lenged claims by CWU Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al Joanne Ogeer that TSTT ex­ec­u­tives had promised work­ers a 10 per cent wage in­crease. He said con­sul­ta­tions with both the com­pa­ny’s chair­man and act­ing CEO con­firmed that no such pro­pos­al had been placed on the bar­gain­ing ta­ble.

“Every time the CWU speaks, they are shift­ing the goal­post,” Padarath said.

“I can say very clear­ly and cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly that I have been ad­vised that no 10 per cent wage ne­go­ti­a­tion of­fer was ever made.”

Padarath said while TSTT’s re­cent fi­nan­cial state­ments re­flect­ed im­proved per­for­mance, the com­pa­ny’s pri­or­i­ty re­mained long-term fi­nan­cial sus­tain­abil­i­ty rather than wage in­creas­es.

“While we are on the tra­jec­to­ry of growth and look­ing at new ar­eas of busi­ness de­vel­op­ment in TSTT, we can­not think about to­day. We have to think about to­mor­row and, there­fore, they can protest from now till thy king­dom come. There is no 10 per cent wage of­fer on the ta­ble. We will act in good faith in terms of re­turn­ing to the bar­gain­ing ta­ble, to which there is a process,” Padarath said.

He al­so ques­tioned whether the union’s ac­tions were po­lit­i­cal­ly mo­ti­vat­ed, not­ing the make­up of the crowd that at­tend­ed Fri­day’s protest, in­clud­ing the pres­ence of en­vi­ron­men­tal ac­tivist Wayne Kublals­ingh, whom he de­scribed as a long­time op­po­nent of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress.

Kublals­ingh gained na­tion­al promi­nence af­ter stag­ing two hunger strikes against the con­struc­tion of the Debe-to-Mon De­sir seg­ment of the Solomon Ho­choy High­way ex­ten­sion dur­ing the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship ad­min­is­tra­tion.

He was al­so in­volved in protests against pro­posed alu­mini­um smelter projects in Chatham and La Brea in the mid-to-late 2000s.

In an im­me­di­ate re­sponse yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Ogeer de­scribed the min­is­ter’s re­marks as “base­less di­a­tribe and hubris.”