Government Never Intended to Consider Any Other Outcome for Petrotrin

Government Never Intended to Consider Any Other Outcome for Petrotrin
I still read some voices speaking romantically about ‘alternatives’ to Government’s plan for Petrotrin.
I also hear a lot of voices speaking in blissful ignorance even today about only refinery workers losing their jobs and Government should negotiate packages including land and houses, etc.
Both sets of voices have completely misunderstood the PNM’s ‘seamless transition’ strategy for Petrotrin, or shall I now say Heritage and Paria Cos, which is the strategy tried and tested in the saga of BWIA-CAL over the 2006-7 New Year period.
Fortunately, or otherwise, having grown up in a house headed by a man who spent his entire working life at BWIA, I was also involved in the PNM’s ‘seamless transition’ of the airline, having been asked to assist CATTU in the negotiations for its Collective Agreement in 2006,
Perhaps if the trade union movement and others had studied that experience a bit more closely, they would have understood what the PNM was about with Petrotrin.
When the intention to close the refinery was finally announced on August 28, I posed the question on Facebook – Is this Government’s Opening Gambit or Final Position? The answers I got told me that those responding clearly did not have that feeling of déjà vu that I did having lived the BWIA-CAL experience.
Petrotrin has been an almost carbon-copy edition of BWIA-CAL.
From the lack of real information, to the ritual dance of ‘negotiations’ in bad faith, including signing of MOA’s with no intention to honour, to big announcement, to the bullish drive to action the transition plan, firing all the workers, registering company names while pretending to be discussing, to the injunctions and Appeal Court proceedings – All of this scripted, even with some of the same authors, as in 2006-7.,
The outcome – CAL replaced BWIA, with an aircraft mystically flying off to London as a BWIA plane with a BWIA crew on December 31 and the return flight with the exact same aircraft and exact same crew, but now CAL and not BWIA. The unions gone, the Collective Agreements gone, and a few workers ‘re-employed’ to do the same jobs in a company doing essentially the same thing but on individual contract, rather than negotiated agreements.
Canada’s Bombardier enjoyed lucrative contracts to supply turbo-prop airplanes that Bombardier managers at CAL convinced Government to buy.
Now, here we are. All Petrotrin workers being dismissed. Heritage and Paria (and perhaps the other 2 companies the Energy and Finance Ministers spoke of) will hire some back without the 2 unions and with NO Collective Agreements.
Even some of the consultants directing from the shadows are the same.
What is happening now, is exactly what the PNM intended all along.
But, they pretended to be unsure, to be doing in-depth studies and making decisive moves to address issues which were illusions to disguise the real intent.
The union, forgetful of the BWIA-CAL ‘seamless transition’ harboured illusions that the company and Government were ‘listening to them’ with the establishment of the Lashley Committee and the signing of the April MOA.
The Government was very sure of its objectives and executed its plan without wavering.
Where is the debt - $185M US and $175M US – that were supposed to be the ‘real’ problems, the straws that ‘broke the Petrotrin bank’?
Where is the money ‘in these hard times’ S1B, then $2B to pay off the dismissed workers coming from?
All but disappeared. They were never the real issues in the first place.
They were part of the ‘air war’ to keep attention focused away from the ‘ground war’ itself.
The severance packages didn’t even have to be negotiated. They were already part of the Collective Agreements and the cost of dismissing all 5,000 or so workers could easily have been calculated.
The Executive Board and Management morphed ‘seamlessly’ almost unnoticed into what is now calling itself the Transition Team. No, a Rose by any other Name is not as sweet.
Everything from these seemingly innocuous name changes were part of the deadly ‘seamless transition’ reenacted at Petrotrin-Heritage/Paria et al.
Hopefully, the industrial relations experts and historians will pay more attention to analysing and recording the lessons of this episode than was done with BWIA-CAL.
There will surely more déjà vu to come as long as the architects of this Modus Operandi occupy the seat of power.
Approaching such situations with romanticism, delusion and faith in the word of those whose deed does not match their word will yield no different outcome in the future unfortunately.
 
Clyde A Weatherhead
A Citizen Fighting still for the
Nation-building Project
15 October 2018