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Citizens would have to brace for a possible shutdown of services at the offices of the Customs and Excise Division and Board of Inland Revenue (BIR) on "black" Friday (March 13).
Employees at both departments plan to stay away from work on that day to "pray and reflect" about the government's decision to terminate their jobs and offer more than 2,000 of them Voluntary Separation Enhancement Packages (VSEP) to make way for the new Trinidad and Tobago Revenue Authority (TTRA).
The decision was taken at a meeting called by their representative union, the Public Service Association (PSA), yesterday at the Centre of Excellence, Macoya, to discuss the matter.
The workers made it clear that they were prepared to fight for their jobs and vowed to take whatever action was necessary to force the Government to rescind its decision.
Scores of workers employed at the various branches of the BIR and Customs and Excise Division attended yesterday's meeting which lasted over three hours.
The meeting began just after 1 p.m. The workers were addressed by a number of union executives, including PSA president, Jennifer Baptiste-Primus; vice president, Stephen Thomas; and deputy secretary general, Robert Dean.
While the media was not allowed to sit in on the meeting, loud and angry voices echoed outside the hallway as the workers openly vented their emotions and voiced their concerns.
"We were treated with scant courtesy and we were blatantly disrespected," one irate female employee charged.
"We should shut down Customs and Excise Division, then nothing comes in (the country) nothing goes out ... and then we have the Summit of the Americas coming up, that is all I would say," she said to loud cheers from her colleagues.
Most of the employees who took to the floor voiced their concerns about their future and that of their families. They generally felt that they were just being "discarded" by the government after years of service in the public sector.
Baptiste-Primus, in her address to the workers, charged that Prime Minister Patrick Manning had deceived the population, when in seeking to placate citizens worried over the economic downturn in a national address, he assured that "no one in the public sector was going to lose their jobs".
She also slammed Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira for claiming that the union had known that VSEP was always on the cards for the workers.
"Yes, VSEP was one of the options but it was not the only option. There was also the option of transferring them over to the Authority and a third to allow them the option of remaining in the public sector. The Government agreed to grant them all three options. ... The option of VSEP is being forced on the workers," she thundered.
Baptiste-Primus said Nunez-Tesheira must now explain to the workers why the Government reneged on its initial position.
