Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­ton@cnc3.co.tt

T&T Postal Cor­po­ra­tion (TTPost) gen­er­al man­ag­er George Alex­is is urg­ing that good sense pre­vail in the con­tin­u­ing wage ne­go­ti­a­tions and be­tween the state-owned com­pa­ny and the T&T Postal Work­ers’ Union.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia at the Na­tion­al Mail Cen­tre, Pi­ar­co, yes­ter­day, Alex­is sought to clar­i­fy state­ments made by the union, par­tic­u­lar­ly their claim that an 18.6 per cent salary in­crease had been grant­ed and was owed to work­ers.

He said, “It was a rec­om­men­da­tion made by a con­sul­tant who’s nei­ther part of the or­gan­i­sa­tion nor part of the gov­ern­ment struc­ture. A rec­om­men­da­tion is just that—a rec­om­men­da­tion.”

He added, “The study it­self was re­viewed by the chief per­son­nel of­fi­cer (CPO) sev­er­al years ago. The CPO found that the job eval­u­a­tion ex­er­cise had sev­er­al flaws and ad­vised that it need­ed to be re­vis­it­ed.”

Alex­is al­so not­ed that the union was made aware of this in writ­ing. The rec­om­men­da­tion dates back to 2010. Alex­is said any de­ci­sion by the cor­po­ra­tion or Gov­ern­ment to ad­just work­er salaries had to go through col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing and be based on pre­vail­ing mar­ket con­di­tions.

Re­gard­ing the union’s claim of an agree­ment to im­ple­ment the 18.6 per cent in­crease, Alex­is said, “We’ve asked to see a copy of that agree­ment. If pre­vi­ous man­age­ment signed off on it, we would like to see it.”

He al­so de­nied claims by the union that man­age­ment was en­cour­ag­ing staff to sign pe­ti­tions to the union that they want­ed the four per cent that was be­ing of­fered by TTPost.

The union’s gen­er­al sec­re­tary, David Forbes, made this claim last week.

“Well, the union called me last week, I be­lieve it was Thurs­day. I can’t re­mem­ber the ex­act time, but it was late morn­ing, and they said they had some con­cerns about their mem­bers sign­ing pe­ti­tions and send­ing it to them,” Alex­is said.

“As I said to Mr Forbes in that phone con­ver­sa­tion, that is not man­age­ment busi­ness. That is be­tween the mem­bers of the union and the ex­ec­u­tive of the union. Any work­ers that come to my man­age­ment team and ask about these is­sues, I di­rect them, and I di­rect my man­agers, to take it up with the union.”

The state com­pa­ny was al­so chas­tised by the union for host­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions at Drew Manor in San­ta Cruz.

How­ev­er, Alex­is said, “Hold­ing meet­ings in an of­fice en­vi­ron­ment that’s es­sen­tial­ly a shop floor set­ting can lead to dis­trac­tions and lim­it pro­duc­tiv­i­ty dur­ing ses­sions. It’s im­por­tant to con­sid­er that such meet­ings would have been bud­get­ed for in ad­vance.

“The union’s as­ser­tion that these funds should be al­lo­cat­ed to work­ers over­looks the re­al­i­ty that fi­nan­cial pro­vi­sions for ar­rears, back­pay, or salary ad­just­ments are sep­a­rate from the com­pa­ny’s bud­get­ing for op­er­a­tional needs, such as meet­ings with third par­ties or oth­er rou­tine ex­pens­es.”

The union and TTPost man­age­ment met on Jan­u­ary 24 at Drew Manor in San­ta Cruz. Since then, TTPost said, the union has not sub­mit­ted pro­pos­als.