PM: Govt will do all it can to save public sector jobs

RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar says her Gov­ern­ment will do all it can to save pub­lic sec­tor jobs.

“We have no in­ten­tion of cut­ting back jobs in the pub­lic ser­vice. In fact, we in­tend to fill va­can­cies, thou­sands of va­can­cies in the pub­lic ser­vice on a phased ba­sis. This is my plan, that we will ad­ver­tise and let peo­ple come in to ap­ply for the jobs in the pub­lic ser­vice,” Per­sad-Bisses­sar said af­ter mak­ing an ap­pear­ance at the clos­ing of the Ja­va Crick­et Camp in Pe­nal yes­ter­day.

How­ev­er, she ad­mit­ted Gov­ern­ment would have to look at the con­tract em­ploy­ment sit­u­a­tion with­in the sec­tor.

“On the oth­er hand, what we may have to cut is con­tract em­ploy­ment be­cause the salaries are much, much high­er. You have no se­cu­ri­ty of tenure in your job. You can­not get a loan. You can­not get a mort­gage. You can­not lever­age your job on con­tract. And they are by na­ture not fixed, so that you could be sent home at any time. So, the monies from sav­ings on the con­tract jobs will be used to help us fund more pub­lic sec­tor jobs. That is my vi­sion. As I say, it will have to hap­pen on a phased ba­sis.”

The Prime Min­is­ter was re­spond­ing to claims that the State was hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ty pay­ing pub­lic ser­vants’ salaries in re­cent weeks and an al­le­ga­tion by for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Colm Im­bert that Gov­ern­ment had been us­ing mon­ey meant for loans to con­duct crit­i­cal work at State agen­cies and fund­ing for the last two months of fis­cal 2025. Im­bert made the claim dur­ing a Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment meet­ing in Mor­vant on Tues­day night. (See page 7)

On these eco­nom­ic mat­ters, Per­sad-Bisses­sar crit­i­cised for­mer min­is­ter of fi­nance Im­bert, say­ing: “Well, I would like to ask the for­mer Min­is­ter of Fi­nance what he did with $566 bil­lion, be­cause every­thing is in a state of sham­bles. And he bor­rowed to pay bor­row­ings, loans. So, noth­ing is new in fi­nance. There are dif­fer­ent fi­nanc­ing mech­a­nisms. And they left us with an emp­ty trea­sury.”

She con­tin­ued, “My Gov­ern­ment will do all that we can to keep the coun­try work­ing and mov­ing along again. So, if we use the fi­nanc­ing mech­a­nisms, noth­ing is new about that. And noth­ing will be old about that. He (Im­bert) did the same and more.”