Some 46 municipal police officers attached to the San Fernando City Corporation will receive backpay amounting to $1.7 million on Friday. At the same time, nine of them who staged sickout action on Monday by staying away from the job over the non-payment of arrears will face disciplinary action, Asst Supt Leon Lively says.
Of the 12 police who were rostered for the day shift on Monday, only three turned up, meaning that daily street patrols along the busy High and Mucurapo Streets did not take place and no cars were wrecked. San Fernando mayor Kazim Hosein met with Lively and other administrative officers on Monday and promised his council would move to pay the money to over 28 of them by Friday.
At that meeting at City Hall, Lively said the backpay was retroactive from 2013 and comes from Government’s $1,000 special allowance to all law enforcement officers announced by Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar in 2011. With the decision to pay them, Lively said full operations should have resumed by Monday night. However, no one showed up for the start of the 5 pm shift.
“Disciplinary action will have to be taken,” Lively said. “I will have to call in the officers one by one and serve them notices accordingly. Presently, my department is understaffed and I am working with a strength of 28 officers, when my strength is supposed to be 53. “I will have to talk to them, warn them and let them know the seriousness of the action taken, because as you know we are an essential service and you cannot strike as the case may be.”
He said the police were entitled to 14 days’ sick leave and 14 days’ casual leave. Speaking after the meeting, Hosein said the police should have been paid before. “We got Cabinet approval, we have the money to pay and it should have been paid. I got a lot of complaints, because we had a bomb scare today and I had asked for a report, and nobody could have gone there to give me a report,” he said.
Asked about the delay in payment, city corporation CEO Indarjit Singh said they were awaiting the computation of the payment, which was only released to him on September 25. “The computation for the backpay for the officers is for the past four years. It is a process that requires staff. This is extra work and that is the process.
“In terms of the remedy, the corporation now has to pay the backpay and we will wait for the release of the funds. We are going to use our money to pay the backpay,” Singh said.