Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­ton@cnc3.co.tt

Ne­go­ti­a­tions be­tween the Oil­fields Work­ers’ Trade Union (OW­TU) and the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) of­fi­cial­ly be­gan yes­ter­day, fol­low­ing height­ened protest ac­tion by staff last week.

The OW­TU, which rep­re­sents ad­min­is­tra­tive staff and dai­ly-paid work­ers at the uni­ver­si­ty, had es­ca­lat­ed in­dus­tri­al ac­tion on March 14, when the work­ers marched through the cam­pus to the Teach­ing and Learn­ing Com­plex (TLC) Build­ing, where the uni­ver­si­ty man­age­ment was hold­ing a cam­pus coun­cil meet­ing, de­mand­ing a res­o­lu­tion to over­due wage dis­cus­sions.

In sup­port of their ne­go­ti­a­tion team yes­ter­day, work­ers again held a march be­fore the team en­tered the Hu­man Re­sources De­part­ment of the uni­ver­si­ty.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, OW­TU UWI branch pres­i­dent Curt Stew­art said, “We will just in­ten­si­fy [our ac­tions] be­cause they have gone ahead and ne­go­ti­at­ed on be­half of them­selves, which is very un­fair and does not en­sure eq­ui­ty across the board at all. This morn­ing, we will en­sure that we get our just due, and we are will­ing to con­tin­ue the strug­gle un­til the Gov­ern­ment or some­body hears us.”

Stew­art added, “We’re just fol­low­ing up on last week’s meet­ing, where the cam­pus reg­is­trar com­mit­ted to meet­ing with the union this week for fur­ther dis­cus­sions on our long-over­due ne­go­ti­a­tions.

“It was on­ly when work­ers came out in large num­bers last week­end that the uni­ver­si­ty de­cid­ed to re­spond and agreed to meet with us this morn­ing. So now, we are head­ing to the HR De­part­ment, where a meet­ing with uni­ver­si­ty man­age­ment is sched­uled for 10 am,” he said.

He said the out­stand­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions cov­ered mul­ti­ple pe­ri­ods, in­clud­ing 2015–2017 for month­ly-paid work­ers and 2014–2016 for dai­ly-paid work­ers.

The OW­TU’s pro­pos­al in­cludes a six per cent wage in­crease, dis­trib­uted as two per cent per year over three years, and a con­sol­i­da­tion of ben­e­fits.

Stew­art said more than 800 work­ers, in­clud­ing clean­ers, plumbers, elec­tri­cians, car­pen­ters, and tech­ni­cians, were af­fect­ed by the stalled ne­go­ti­a­tions.

The dis­cus­sions con­clud­ed short­ly af­ter mid­day, with sev­er­al key terms and con­di­tions ad­dressed.