Talks with pipeline workers break down

Negotiations aimed at settling wage issues and restarting work on the National Gas Company’s (NGC) 56-inch cross-country pipeline broke down yesterday after striking workers accused project contractors — API Pipeline/Bechtel International — of negotiating in bad faith. API contract workers’ representative, Ernest Thompson, who last week successfully negotiated a major salary increase for striking construction workers on the Atlantic LNG Train IV site, told Newsday that negotiations, which were taking place at Paria Suites in La Romaine yesterday, broke down after the project’s contractors refused to increase workers’ salaries.

“Both companies have made it clear that they are not going to pay workers more than what they are presently receiving,” Thompson said. The situation could not come at a worse time in the energy sector which is still coming to grips with the crippling ten-week strike by construction workers at Atlantic LNG’s Train IV site. That strike cost Government millions of dollars in lost revenue and construction on Train IV is now ten weeks late. And while not saying that a strike was near, API workers’ representatives told Newsday that until the negotiations could be restarted “there could be further rumblings” in the energy sector.

“We are now calling on Prime Minister Patrick Manning to personally intervene in this dispute before it escalates into something that he himself would not be able to control,” Thompson warned. Manning  visited the ALNG strike camp in Point Fortin last week and mere hours later an agreement was hammered out which ended the strike. Thompson also called for a mass mobilisation of workers, saying brother organisations had to stand together and ensure workers were not being exploited by their employers. He said workers would also seek the intervention of the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) in the API impasse. Contacted for comment yesterday, a high-ranking official at API Pipeline/Bechtel said the company had “no information to release to the media.”