Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

Trans­port and In­dus­tri­al Work­ers Union (TI­WU) pres­i­dent Shawn Roberts is call­ing on Gov­ern­ment to ex­pe­dite wage dis­cus­sions with the union, as he says there is an ur­gent need to re­view the salaries of em­ploy­ees.

Roberts made the com­ment yes­ter­day, af­ter de­liv­er­ing a let­ter which sought the Gov­ern­ment’s im­me­di­ate at­ten­tion on the is­sue to of­fi­cials at the Min­istry of Trans­port and Civ­il Avi­a­tion on Lon­don Street, Port-of-Spain.

In a show of sol­i­dar­i­ty, Roberts led work­ers from the Pub­lic Trans­port Ser­vices Cor­po­ra­tion (PTSC) at City Gate on South Quay to the min­istry.

He not­ed that the fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion for many PTSC work­ers was dire, as they strug­gled to sup­port them­selves and their fam­i­lies with their cur­rent salaries.

“There are a lot of sin­gle par­ents who have loans, mort­gages and so on. Some­times work­ers take home af­ter ex­pens­es is as lit­tle as $100 and change af­ter a fort­night due to the cost of liv­ing,” he said.

“Work­ers are suf­fer­ing, the PTSC mem­ber­ship is suf­fer­ing and some­thing has to be done.”

Roberts said he was con­fi­dent the Gov­ern­ment would be able to ad­dress these con­cerns, not­ing that he and mem­bers of TI­WU’s ex­ec­u­tive have met with Min­is­ter of Trans­port and Civ­il Avi­a­tion Eli Za­k­our sev­er­al times since he as­sumed of­fice.

He al­so not­ed that he met with PTSC of­fi­cials last Fri­day and was told the cor­po­ra­tion “re­ceived no in­struc­tions from their prin­ci­pals,” which mo­ti­vat­ed the union to write their let­ter seek­ing at­ten­tion on their ne­go­ti­a­tions from the Gov­ern­ment.

When con­tact­ed for com­ment yes­ter­day, Min­is­ter Za­k­our con­firmed that he re­ceived the let­ter from the union.

“I do in­tend to meet with the rel­e­vant stake­hold­ers to be­gin the process of ad­dress­ing the con­cerns raised. I al­so had a con­ver­sa­tion with pres­i­dent Shawn Roberts, in­di­cat­ing to him that I am in re­ceipt of his let­ter,” Za­k­our said.

Roberts ear­li­er said he would not ap­ply a time­line for the Gov­ern­ment’s ac­tion on the mat­ter, but ten­ta­tive­ly ex­pect­ed to re­ceive a re­sponse be­tween Jan­u­ary and March 2026.