500 Caroni workers accept VSEP

TODAY is the eighth working day since Caroni (1975) Limited employees were offered a Voluntary Separation of Employment Package (VSEP), and so far just over 500 workers have accepted.

Of the 9,000 plus workers offered VSEP, Caroni yesterday confirmed that 517 employees have accepted, “with a slow by steady flow of workers signing up”. Caroni’s Human Resources Manager, Selwyn Bhajan, told Newsday yesterday that two thirds of the 517 employees who have accepted, are daily-paid workers of the company.
On the first day VSEP was made available, Bhajan said, 30 employees accepted and signed their forms. The rate at which the company was receiving signed applications, he added, was “slow but steadily increasing”. He said the human resource department was conducting an analysis of the rate and “pattern” at which signed applications were being returned to employers. Caroni’s workers have been given 45 days to sign and return their respective VSEP offers, to the company’s HR department. VSEP forms part of a restructuring exercise to scale down the sugar company’s operations.

“The workers have approximately five more weeks to consider whether to accept the offer,” Bhajan said. Most of the workers who have accepted thus far are members of the All Trinidad Sugar and General Workers’ Trade Union (ATSGWTU). The union’s president general Rudranath Indarsingh, yesterday disputed the company’s figures saying as far as the union was aware, only 216 employees had accepted.
He said the acceptance level was indeed slow and that it was evident that company’s workers were carefully weighing their options. The union has been holding meetings in the sugar belt criticising the VSEP offer. Indarsingh addressed the issue yesterday at Petit Morne sugar estate in Ste Madeleine. He said that the union would continue to oppose the payment of VSEP if Government did not make clear its plan on how 77,000 acres of Caroni’s lands are to be developed and distributed.