Roget and his $$ package

THE EDITOR: I was surprised to see that OWTU president general Ancel Roget was getting a termination letter from Petrotrin, having assumed that he made his living as a trade union leader.

It turns out that the peculiar arrangement between Petrotrin and the OWTU was that the company would pay his salary, even though Mr Roget as a trade union leader did not actually work in the job for which Petrotrin hired him. So the management of the company was paying the man who continually criticised the management of the company.

Now, after an initial grand charge of refusing to accept his termination letter, Roget made an about-face and accepted the package. Maybe he found out how much he was getting since, under the generous severance deal offered by the company, he is hardly likely to be getting less than $1 million.

That change of position is simply a reflection of economic realities, which Mr Roget and other trade union leaders never had to face when the energy dollars were flowing. Indeed, their entire careers have been built on defying economic principles, which means that while they benefited, the population as a whole was made worse off.

The trade unions' unreasonable demands at Petrotrin helped undermine the country’s economy and bring all citizens to this sorry pass. Hopefully, now that people are seeing that trade unionists have always been hollow men, their anti-economic rhetoric will not skew policy-making any more.

ELTON SINGH, Couva