OWTU: Return of all T&TEC staff to work can cause COVID spike

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With the highly transmissible Delta Variant of COVID-19 making its way around the Caribbean, the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) is warning that a decision by the Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission (T&TEC) to recall its entire workforce can lead to another major spike.

“We are warning the country that the reckless behaviour of people in the senior management of T&TEC can cause a spike in Trinidad & Tobago,” OWTU President General Ancel Roget said during a media conference in San Fernando yesterday.

Despite vaccinations among T&TEC workers, Roget expressed concern, especially with the Delta Variant spreading. To date, there are no reported cases of that variant in this country. He said he was also concerned that COVID-19 cases were still high.

“If the management is allowed to go ahead with what they are implementing, we can face some problems in this country with respect to the spread of not just COVID-19, you know, but this new Delta Variant.”

While the government has been removing restrictions to allow some business sectors to resume operations, Roget said the nature of T&TEC operations mean workers can easily contract and spread the disease.

Last year, the OWTU and T&TEC agreed that employees would report to their stations on rotation. It ensured that if any group of employees contracted the disease while on duty, those at home were protected. Following a sanitisation of the workplaces, employees, who were home, would fill in for those in isolation and quarantine. Roget said T&TEC was able to carry out its operation smoothly.

The OWTU provided graphs that showed that before the rotational system began, 33 employees got infected, and 112 went into quarantine. In April, there were 24 positive cases and 38 in quarantine. Up to last week, there were even fewer.

So far, two T&TEC employees have died from COVID-19.

Roget said T&TEC’s management called the OWTU into a meeting to discuss their plan to end the rotation. Despite the OWTU’s objection, he said, the management recalled employees on Wednesday.

He said wherever there were service disruptions, T&TEC crews continued to go to various locations to get the job done and would often interact with customers without knowing their COVID-19 status. Roget argued that workers can easily contract the disease at customers’ homes or workplaces and eventually transmit it to their colleagues, who can unknowingly take it home to their families and other places.

“To be able to provide continuity of service, you do not want a situation where if you have an outbreak in T&TEC, like we had on more than one occasion, that you do not want to have to remove from that operation, all of the workers because everybody now affected.”

The OWTU plans to write to Minister of Health Terrence Deyalsingh on this matter as Roget said the government issued workplace guidelines, which he accused T&TEC of not following. Roget also called on Minister of Public Utilities Marvin Gonzales and Minister of Labour Stephen Mc Clashie to intervene.

But in a response issued yesterday afternoon, T&TEC said it has made every effort to provide the public with a reliable supply of electricity but with staff on rotation this is untenable in the long term and has started to impact on reliability.

The Commission said, “Unfortunately, maintenance work cannot be deferred indefinitely as this will eventually manifest as a major problem such as a significant wide-spread outage. In order to complete deferred critical maintenance work on the grid and ensure that reliability continues over the coming months, T&TEC has decided that all office employees will return to work on August 3 and all field employees on August 5.”

T&TEC added the return was in fact delayed by one week based on a request by the OWTU, at a prior meeting to discuss the full resumption of work.

It added, “It is regrettable that the OWTU would choose to resort to fear-mongering among the public with imagined instances of a super spreader site developing and the possibility of employees taking the virus to customers.”