NP workers demand meeting with managers

NP workers protest outside their workplace at Sea Lots, Port of Spain, calling on management to meet with them to discuss several issues.
NP workers protest outside their workplace at Sea Lots, Port of Spain, calling on management to meet with them to discuss several issues.

Workers at National Petroleum (NP) yesterday protested outside the compound calling on management to reverse retrenchments and to pay workers their outstanding money.

Oilfield Workers Trade Union (OWTU) president general Ancel Roget led the members inside the compound to demand a date to meet with management on several issues affecting workers.

Speaking to the media outside NP’s head office at Sea Lots, Roget said NP workers, like those everywhere else, are threatened with job insecurity and there are a number of vacancies to be filled.

“To honour the approved structure which guarantees permanent work to workers filling those structures, when those structures are not filled, it puts the establishment at risk, they put the pension fund at risk,” Roget said. “Therefore our call is for the NP management to observe strictly the collective agreement as it relates to the structure as it relates to vacancies.

“The wagons you see that pull up at the gas stations to deliver fuel to the motoring public, we have a situation where some 80 per cent of those involved in that activity are contractors. The 20 per cent are NP workers when in fact it should be the reverse. Overtime what has happened that through their own corrupt means and their corrupt connections, the management directed by the politicians would have engaged contractors to do jobs that employees are supposed to be performing that adds to the threat, job security at NP,” Roget said.

He said the OWTU is not going to sit idly by and allow anybody to send home the workers who perform crucial functions upon which the country depends.

Roget explained that when one worker is sent home it has a negative impact, not only on the worker and his family, but an entire community.

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