Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

This coun­try’s pri­vate sec­tor has ear­marked Mon­day (May 4) as the day it will be ready to re-open its doors for busi­ness on a phased ba­sis. And they feel they will need all the good­will they can get to face the cur­rent COVID-19 chal­lenge.

Ad­dress­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of re­open­ing busi­ness­es yes­ter­day, T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce CEO Gabriel Faria said the cham­ber had sub­mit­ted a “safe to open” pro­to­col to the sub-com­mit­tee of the team es­tab­lished to chart a re­cov­ery road map for T&T post-COVID.

Faria said he was op­ti­mistic the doc­u­ment could work giv­en the re­cent re­port from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ox­ford say­ing T&T was more ready to ex­it lock­down mea­sure than most coun­tries cur­rent­ly im­ple­ment­ing such mea­sures. The Ox­ford sur­vey ranked T&T sec­ond on­ly to Viet­nam in the world on that readi­ness.

The four mea­sures used by Ox­ford to rank the coun­tries were con­trol of virus trans­mis­sion; test­ing, trac­ing and iso­la­tion poli­cies; man­age­ment of risk of ex­port­ing and im­port­ing cas­es and com­mu­ni­ty en­gage­ment.

Faria com­mend­ed the Health Min­istry for its work in help­ing the coun­try ma­noeu­vre through COVID-19.

“The Trinidad and To­ba­go Cham­ber has ac­tu­al­ly built out a safe to open pro­to­col and we have pre­sent­ed this to a sub­com­mit­tee of the Road Map to Re­cov­ery Com­mit­tee which goes for every­thing from shift work, so that em­ploy­ees don’t need to all come to work at the same time, to work from home, so there are very ro­bust safe to work pro­to­cols in place,” Faria said.

“And I firm­ly be­lieve that work­ing in con­junc­tion with the Min­istry of Health we have no choice but to al­so look at how we bal­ance liveli­hood with sav­ing lives.”

Faria said it was on­ly in an ide­al world that a gov­ern­ment would be able to pay busi­ness­es to re­main close. But say­ing this could not hap­pen, he said the econ­o­my needs to be restart­ed.

“The pri­vate sec­tor is ready­ing it­self to tak­ing a risk-based ap­proach to restart­ing the econ­o­my. What this means is that work­ing in con­junc­tion with the Min­istry of Health, we need to grad­u­al­ly open the less risky busi­ness­es,” he said.

“I think it is im­por­tant that we have a struc­tured ap­proach. I think it is im­por­tant that the Min­istry of Health pro­vides a ro­bust frame­work that ed­u­cates the pop­u­la­tion, the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty and of course the em­ploy­ees so that every­one un­der­stands what they need to do when they re­turn to work in a re­spon­si­ble way.”

He said a phased ba­sis ap­proach would be re­quired to en­sure mea­sures are eval­u­at­ed.

“Again not every busi­ness, just to be very clear, not every busi­ness, but in a phased ap­proach where we could eval­u­ate the out­comes of mak­ing de­ci­sions. And an­oth­er part of that has to be prop­er mon­i­tor­ing of staff, so it is mak­ing sure that if a staff mem­ber falls ill you have a pro­to­col with deal­ing with that,” he said.

One of the com­pa­nies many Tri­nis are hop­ing will re­open soon is KFC. Si­mon Hardy, the CEO of Pres­tige Hold­ings Lim­it­ed, KFC’s par­ent com­pa­ny, yes­ter­day wel­comed the Ox­ford sur­vey news.

“As men­tioned, T&T has been recog­nised for its pre­pared­ness. This has been a hard-won po­si­tion that we all have a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to main­tain and not let slip. We are so ex­cit­ed to be able to serve our cus­tomers again but we en­cour­age all our cus­tomers, and all of T&T, to ob­serve the guid­ance giv­en to us by the Gov­ern­ment and its med­ical ad­vi­sors. It has worked for us so far so let’s all Stay Safe,” Hardy said.

Hardy said it may take some time for Pres­tige to be ready to serve cus­tomers again.

“Af­ter the length of shut­down that we will have ex­pe­ri­enced, busi­ness the size and scale of Pres­tige would take some time to be ready to serve our cus­tomers. Our pri­ma­ry fo­cus is the safe­ty of our staff and cus­tomers, so we need to en­sure all as­pects of our busi­ness are in or­der be­fore we can serve our cus­tomers again,” he said.

“Just like oth­er busi­ness­es, we are very ea­ger to be able to serve the pub­lic again. We await the specifics of the Gov­ern­ment’s pro­to­cols for re-open­ing of restau­rants and will be guid­ed by these. In ad­di­tion, we have iden­ti­fied the key things nec­es­sary to be able to re-open in as quick as time as pos­si­ble, whilst keep­ing safe­ty at the front of our con­sid­er­a­tions.”

Be­cause Pres­tige us­es a lot of lo­cal prod­ucts, Hardy said it does not an­tic­i­pate it may be as ad­verse­ly af­fect­ed by the glob­al short­ages tak­ing place.

“A lot of what we buy is sourced lo­cal­ly. In terms of in­ter­na­tion­al sup­plies, we nor­mal­ly main­tain ad­e­quate lev­els of sup­plies in our ware­house so we do not an­tic­i­pate any ma­jor dis­rup­tion at this time, but ob­vi­ous­ly, this sit­u­a­tion can change rapid­ly based on is­sues out­side of our con­trol,” he said.

He said Pres­tige will al­so like­ly ex­plore the use of more tech­nol­o­gy fol­low­ing COVID-19 go­ing for­ward.

The T&T Coali­tion of Ser­vices In­dus­tries (TTC­SI), in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTMA), mean­while sur­veyed its mem­bers to as­sess the im­pact of COVID-19 on busi­ness­es.

Some 78 per cent of those sur­veyed re­port­ed ex­pe­ri­enc­ing neg­a­tive sales and cit­ed a re­duc­tion in open­ing hours as the cause.

While the ma­jor­i­ty of those sur­veyed were op­ti­mistic their op­er­a­tions would re­bound fol­low­ing the pan­dem­ic, “65 per cent of re­spon­dents in­di­cat­ed that they would need fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance should their op­er­a­tions be re­strict­ed for an­oth­er three months”.