Duke to BIR staff: Take Monday off

The Public Services Association (PSA) is taking a fresh round of protests to the Board of Inland Revenue (BIR).

"On Monday all of you are taking a day off, for justice,” PSA president Watson Duke told some 70 BIR workers yesterday as he addressed them at the Finance Ministry building on the Government Campus Plaza, Port of Spain.

“Wear white on Monday,” he urged the workers as he called on them to take the day to publicly protest alleged threats to their job security. He told them to rally at the Hall of Justice, Port of Spain, where they will likely be joined by judiciary staff who have been protesting all this week, and who are also concerned about their job status.

Duke warned workers that the Government was aiming to introduce a new performance appraisal system, allegedly contrived to give them each a failing grade, to suggest they were incompetent and so pave the way for their replacement by new, contract workers.

Duke also claimed the BIR workers were being set up as scapegoats for the delay by Government in issuing pension cheques for retrenched workers at Petrotrin.

“They are using the Petrotrin thing to say (BIR) workers are lazy.”

He also alleged that just as fresh staff were replacing the retrenched workers from Petrotrin at its successor companies, so too the BIR staff could be replaced.

“The Government will contract out the important areas of the BIR and everyone will go. This Government is brutal, like Brutus. Unless we can bring this Government to its knees, they’ll attack you, one by one.”

Duke told workers the Prime Minister was not losing any sleep over the 5,000 workers retrenched from Petrotrin.

“You think they care about you? Save your life, your work life!”

Sharing his memories, he said, “Do you know how hard it is to lose your job? These are decent people, who can’t pay their bills. Ten thousand people have lost their jobs in this country. You are next. Take that as a prophesy, folks.”

He predicted WASA workers would soon join the ranks of those protesting to save their job. Upset at the role in all of this of Minister in the Ministry of Finance Allyson West, Duke punned that this was "all a case of Alice In Wonderland."