Prayers for Petrotrin

THE board of State-owned Petrotrin has invited the executive and Oilfield Workers Trade Union (OWTU) to join them next Tuesday for a presentation on the way forward for the company.

The meeting is scheduled for 10.30 am. The venue for the meeting has not been disclosed.

Efforts to confirm whether the union would meet with the board were unsuccessful. However, in a meeting on Friday evening in Point Fortin, OWTU’s president general Ancel Roget confirmed that the union was going with full force to the Diplomatic Centre residence of Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, in Port of Spain, on Sunday, to pray for Petrotrin’s survival.

This invitation from the board comes amid speculation fueled by the Opposition that the company was moving forward with plans to retrench workers and deploy soldiers to protect as well as operate the company’s assets. Roget said he was “expecting anything.”

It also follows a meeting Rowley called with the OWTU, one week ago, to discuss the state of the oil company. Both the union and Government agreed that restructuring was the answer to make it viable but held no common grounds on the separation of workers in the process. In the week the country experienced the worst earthquake in this century, Petrotrin continued to rock, not with tremors, but with speculation which began circulating on Friday that Tuesday’s meeting was to roll out the retrenchment plan.

Opposition MP David Lee said he received reports that at both Santa Flora and Pointe-a-Pierre employees were barred from accessing certain functions on their computers, from using printers while USB ports were all locked down to prevent the copying of files. The company dismissed these claims. Chairman Wilfred Espinet said outright he was not going to try to compete with rumours and got the company to release an official response saying all was well.

“Petrotrin continues to operate normally and there has been no change to routine activity. Petrotrin will advise the public of any change as necessary,” the release stated. In an earlier interview, OWTU’s education officer Ozzie Warwick also dismissed reports of the deployment of soldiers to man Petrotrin’s installations as misleading and untrue. Workers said while there was a feeling of unease among them, there were no visible signs of such changes taking place.

Opposition MP Rudy Indarsingh charged that the Rowley/OWTU meeting last week was a farce and that retrenchment was on the cards. He said if workers were sent home, that would affect not only the employees, but the economy of Pointe-a-Pierre and the surrounding communities.

Lee, the MP for Pointe-Pierre where the main refinery is located, said he too had heard restructuring rumours which was creating fear among workers and called on Rowley to “come clean on Petrotrin.”