200 ROUND UP LIKE COWS

National Petroleum Staff Association (NPSA) head Joseph Roberts has decried Petrotrin’s distribution of termination letters to an estimated 200 workers on Friday saying the action should have been handled with a “little more decency”.

The workers were treated like a “herd of cows”, he said.

NPSA members, management personnel and private payroll employees–categories 1 to10–were given termination letters after receiving emails from the state oil company. Some workers were informed by telephone about the date and time to receive their letters.

Management personnel were informed to collect their letters last Friday between 1 pm and 2.30 pm; NPSA members between 2.30 pm and 3.30 pm and private payroll workers between 3.30 pm and 5.30 pm.

Workers who are members of the Oilfields Workers Trade Union (OWTU) were not issued any termination letters.

Sunday Newsday understands there are several categories of workers who are not represented by either the NPSA or the OWTU, such as personnel from the human resources/industrial relations department, ICT department and medical staff who were reportedly told to collect their letters on the weekend. Efforts to contact chairman Wilfred Espinet were unsuccessful.

Roberts said Petrotrin was not liaising with the recognised associations but were communicating directly with workers.

“It is really discourteous the way the company handled the entire situation, given the way they are terminating people, you don’t want to herd them like cows going up the road to sign, that’s a kind of personal thing, so you would want to do that a little differently, with a little more decency for the individuals.

“People are so battered and bruised from this whole experience at Petrotrin, they got a call and they went because people want to finish with the situation.”

Roberts said he was not sure whether the OWTU’s application for injunction to halt the severance of close to 5,000 employees at the Industrial Court had prompted Friday’s action. He said the process would have to be put on hold if the OWTU was successful in the court.

Asked how his members were coping, Roberts said reactions were “mixed” as the older employees and those who were on the verge of retirement expected to benefit from the termination packages.

“It’s a mixed feeling because those people who have a longer service in the company, they would have benefited from the formula that was used in the collective agreement, but those people who are younger in the organisation, they would be really challenged, they are the ones who are just starting off, they have their homes, their mortgages, maybe a new car, they have their children so their package would not be as okay as the people who are older, so some kind of incentive should have been given to those people because they would be more at risk.”

He said members had been informed that government taxes of 25 per cent or more would apply after the first $300,000 in termination payments.

Roberts said Petrotrin was also behaving as if the termination benefits were a “gift” and they were not obligated to pay any monies since it was closing down.

He, however, noted the new holding company and its three subsidiaries would come into being on December 1, saying advertisements should begin appearing within the next two weeks inviting people to apply for positions.

A senior staff member who received her termination letter on Friday said there had not been any other option but to accept the letter.

She too agreed that the newest staff members would be mostly affected by the layoffs as they did not have the years of service as the older workers.