Roget to Rowley: OWTU ready to send you home

YVONNE WEBB

The Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) has warned the PNM administration it could suffer the same fate as its predecessor if it sends home workers from state-owned Petrotrin.

OWTU president Ancel Roget warned that the tables could turn.

“If they (government) come to send workers home, we are prepared to send them home,” he told Trinmar workers at Point Fortin on Wednesday morning in a mobilisation campaign for planned “massive” protest.

Wednesday’s meeting formed part of a response to Rowley’s statement that Petrotrin is a burden on the national treasury. The union head interpreted the statement as laying groundwork for retrenchment despite some 800 existing vacancies, while placing lucrative wells in the hands of private investors.

Roget warned, “Any attempt to put Petrotrin in the hands of private interest is not in the country’s interest. This is the only state entity that produces the products that generate foreign exchange.

“For years workers were risking their lives and limbs to provide as a breadwinner for the country and now you are preparing to send the same workers home.”

Roget said the position the company had found itself in was not the fault of workers, “but successive managements and governments who politicise the company (and who have) the company in the state that it is in now.

“Politics has destroyed Petrotrin. All the parties before and this one also.”

Roget clarified that the union is not against restructuring the oil company. Recalling it was the OWTU that insisted on Petrotrin’s urgent restructuring and which had presented a plan for the initiative to Rowley in February 2017, he asked, “What did he do with it? He supported an incompetent board for months. Now we’re at the point where he has awoken and tells the country that it is urgent.”

Roget expressed suspicion of some “clandestine approach now to come and reorganise it in their own image and likeness.”

He agreed, “Yes, it is urgent, yes we want to restructure, but not in the image and likeness of the PNM. The PNM is bankrupt of ideas. This Prime Minister is bankrupt of ideas. It could not be different if he appoints someone in the calibre of (Wilfred) Espinet to run Petrotrin.”