Protesting hospital wards maids and other public health workers who broke down a door, smashed a glass and caused injury to a security guard at the Health Ministry’s Park Street, Port-of-Spain, head office have been reported to the police by Health Minister Dr Fuad Khan.
“We have reported that to the police and the police will take action,” Khan announced at yesterday’s post-Cabinet media conference.
Asked how the police will be able to identify the group of women, he said: “We have cameras.”
On Wednesday, the group of mainly women barricaded the entrance to the head office, blocking anyone from entering or leaving the building. The police had to be called in.
The wardsmaids moved to the Port-of-Spain General Hospital where Khan was opening the Nephrology Unit and loudly chanted they wanted their money.
When Khan went outside they swarmed around him threateningly but he calmly walked to his waiting vehicle and got in with the women moving in around the car and shouting. Yesterday Khan said the ministry and its security guards took no objection to the workers clamouring for whatever they desired.
However, it was an entirely different matter when it took on the tone of the violence it did, he added.
Khan said he sympathised with the female security guard who did yeoman service and tried to keep the matter under control.
He appealed to workers not to reach to that level of violence in negotiating for wage increases. He asked workers planning any protest action today to do their jobs without such action.
Khan said he understood why they were clamouring for their money before the election.
“They may have been worried they might not get it after,” he added.
Khan said in the political season, he was entitled to put that political spin on the matter.
He said a large fraction of Regional Health Authority (RHA) workers, most of them monthly paid, were non-unionised.
“There is no recognised union for nurses, wardmaids and others,” he said. It was only a small section of daily paid workers who were members of the National Union of Government and Federated Workers, he noted.
When nurses at the Arima District Health Facility stopped working over the same salary issue, Khan said what they were doing was “very illegal.”
Tracing the start of the protests, he said the RHA workers were not members of a union, negotiations for salary increases for them were being done with the Ministry of Health, the RHA and the Ministry of Finance.
The Public Services Association (PSA) got a 14 per cent increase in April this year and soon after that there arose a lot of clamouring by the PSA and the T&T Registered Nurses Association for equitable payments for all those not represented by a union.
Khan said the ministry took cognisance of that and indicated that parity would be given to Ministry of Health and RHA contract workers.