By Chantalé Fletcher
THE Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) is claiming that the Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago (TSTT) has secured at US$70 million bond to finance the retrenchment of 573 workers.
Secretary General of CWU Clyde Elder at a press conference on Friday said that TSTT received the bond through Republic Bank and Oppenheimer.
He said that up to now, TSTT had not informed the union of any retrenchment and that it was without a chairman for some time.
Elder said, “It was only this morning, we understood that Sean Roach has been reappointed as Chairman of TSTT effective March 15, 2022.
“So whatever actions had been taking place occurred without a chairman and without a properly convened board of TSTT, as there were only four directors of a nine-member board.”
Elder also accused TSTT of being secretive in their communication towards the union and the public regarding recent downtime with internet and phone services.
He said he hoped it was inaccurate that TSTT had not paid for certain licences for the renewal of software.
Elder said while TSTT continued to experience this problem, Amplia has been operating without any downtime.
He asked, “What is Amplia’s relationship to TSTT? Are you wholly owned by TSTT or are you really a competitor of TSTT?”
Elder said the union questioned if these actions were due to Minister of Energy and Energy Industries Stuart Young’s announcement on a sub-committee to assess TSTT.
He said, “Is all this a deliberately orchestrated plan by (CEO) Lisa “Amplia” Agard to ensure that TSTT is deemed to be not fit for purpose, so that Amplia could be the Trojan horse and saving company for customers.”
The secretary general said, “TSTT was instructing the call centre operators to tell customers, go over to Amplia.”
Elder said they imagined their purpose was to promote Amplia and give them all the business, while TSTT would be placed as a company that cannot provide service which would destroy them.
He said, “This morning, we received reports on the review of state enterprise and TSTT which was done by Terrence Farrell, and a most recent one indicated to the Government that TSTT should be sold to either a private foreign entity or a private local entity, and the Government should get out of TSTT.”
Elder described this report as troubling and suspected these reports would be then adopted by the sub-committee.
“In which they would say, TSTT is not fit for purpose, we are pulling and closing it down. And we are now going to have a different company provide service to the public, in this case, we believe that different company would be Amplia,” he said.
Elder said, “We believe that this different company will not be unionised and will follow the same Petrotrin model in the hope they will decimate the union and kill off the company.”
He said a lack of prudent financial management of TSTT was the company’s downfall in which they went from $600 million-plus one billion in operating profits to lose over $400 million.
