Joint Trade Union Movement (JTUM) president Ancel Roget says his May Day 2015 wish is to see Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar in handcuffs and being led off to prison.
After leading hundreds of trade unionists through the streets of San Fernando for the annual march to celebrate workers of T&T yesterday, Roget trained his guns on Persad-Bissessar and Labour Minister Errol Mc Leod.
Corrupt politicians, media editors and acting Commissioner of Police Stephen Williams received a tongue lashing as Roget addressed workers at the Harris Promenade bandstand.
He said he did not care who won the general election once the People’s Partnership lost and the union would do whatever had to be done to see the back of this Government so they could begin working on the type of governance T&T needed.
However, he said, there would be no honeymoon for the People’s Partnership’s successor, warning that they too would be driven out of office if they did not deal well with the labour force.
“My May Day wish is that I would like nothing better than to see Kamla Persad-Bissessar in steel braces, handcuffed, being carted off to some maximum security prison for the crime that she has committed on the people of Trinidad and Tobago,” he said.
“I am not (Keith) Rowley or any political leader, I am a trade unionist understanding the politics.”
He said Persad-Bissessar was playing games with the election date and gave notice that if she did not call the election by Labour Day, “all hell will break loose in T&T.”
Responding to Mc Leod’s listing of several achievements at a UNC Monday Night Forum in Fyzabad two weeks ago, Roget said whereas the minister boasted of settling 84 collective agreements and raising the minimum wage, these were all accomplished due to heavy protests by JTUM. He said Mc Leod did not tell the nation that there were many collective agreements still outstanding since 2007, while Tube City in Point Lisas retrenched workers and Petrotrin was set to make 1,500 casual workers redundant in the face of falling profits.
Highway shutdown threat
Roget said 250 expatriates were working on the Solomon Hochoy Highway extension project in positions that citizens were qualified to fill. He said Government was yet to implement a policy on migrant labour and warned that if the expatriates were not removed by next week, the project would be stopped.
“Today, OAS, which has no end of problems, has worries with the proper payment of rates and health and safety standards for its workers. But what is even worse is that they have, as we speak, some 250 expats in the construction of that highway doing normal labour and unskilled work,” he said.
“They are doing work that our nationals can do. So they don’t care that they are displacing our own working population and putting in place expats.
“Take notice, you see all of those expats employed there, if by next week they don’t get those expats out, we will stop the construction of that highway until the workers who are involved, the locals, are treated with respect and dignity.”
Upset over the coverage of labour issues, Roget said media bosses were omitting important pieces of news presented to them. He did not blame the journalists who were covering the event, saying that it was the news editors that were “eating ah food.”
“They try to fool you with all of the nonsense talk when they have their people in the media. Now you know the media are being bought out. “Not you the workers who come out in the hot sun to record all the news and what the trade unions say, but when you go back to your bosses, those news editors that were bought out, what in fact they do is they edit out the most important part of the story,” Roget said. He also labelled acting Commissioner of Police Stephen Williams a “UNC commissioner who was doing government’s bidding.” He accused Williams of attempting to stop their May Day march, but said the authorities would never silence the labour movement.