CWU secretary general denies newspaper report

“The union never presented a list to anybody,” Elder told Newsday yesterday.

“As a matter of fact, we don’t even have a list yet.

I don’t know where they got that from. Nothing I said to the reporter on Sunday was in the papers today (yesterday).” The story also stated that the TDC was scheduled to close yesterday.

Elder said the article was printed without any input from him.

“The only thing in the papers is that we had a meeting with Minister (Stuart) Young and the company on Friday.

That is true. But the result of that meeting was not contained in the paper whatsoever.” Elder said what was supposed to happen yesterday was the employees were supposed to be given their retrenchment notices, but it has not happened as yet.

“That means the workers would be given 45 days notice starting today which is in accordance with the orders of the Court of Appeal.

It is up to the company to decide whether they are doing it today, tomorrow, Wednesday or next week. After the discussions with Minister Young they did indicate they wanted to do that today(yesterday).” Later, at 3 pm yesterday, the TDC called in workers and issued them with retrenchment notices.

Couva North MP Ramona Ramdial said as the TDC closed its doors to make way for a new entity, Tourism Trinidad Destination Management Company Limited, about 120 workers would be left without jobs.

“This new company will now employ 50 workers with no assurances from Tourism Minister Shamfa Cudjoe or Minister Stuart Young that these 50 workers are to be hired from within the cadre of 120 former TDC employees. Even though the CWU, representing the TDC employees, did all necessary to save the jobs of these workers, Government still decided to move ahead and retrench,” Ramdial said.

She said the impact of retrenchment would not just affect the individual workers, but also families.

“In this time of economic hardship where keeping jobs is of utmost importance, we have a weak, incompetent Government, hell-bent on retrenching workers from every sector. We have noteworthy, alternative suggestions being proffered by economists and financial experts where Government can focus on other strategies to cut expenditure and still grow the economy, but instead, thousands of jobs have been lost since this Government assumed office in September 2015,” Ramdial said.

She said the first duty of any government should be to take care of its human resource capital.