Labour Minister Jennifer Baptiste-Primus says her Government fully supports the depoliticisation of appointments to the Industrial Court as recommended by the Industrial Relations Advisory Committee (IRAC).
Baptiste-Primus was speaking at the Tripartite Stakeholder Consultation on the Industrial Relations (Amendment) Bill, 2015, at the National Energy Skills Centre (NESC), in Point Lisas yesterday.
The consultation saw leader of the Joint Trade Union Movement (JTUM) Ancel Roget, Co-operative Credit Union League president Joseph Remy, head of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Claudia Coenjaerts and chief executive officer of the T&T Chamber of Industry and Commerce, Dr Catherine Kumar, also bringing greetings from their respective organisations.
The ILO’s Rainer Pritzer and IRAC’s Dr Hyacinth Guy both made presentations on the recommendations of the IRAC report.
“Today represents the beginning of the process of consultation, among Government, labour and the business sector. We are focusing on IRAC’s report and recommendations,” Baptiste-Primus explained. “It spans recommendations from institutional strengthening of the Ministry of Labour to the recognition board and the industrial court.
“One of the recommendations I am particularly attracted to is the depoliticisation of the appointment of judges to the Industrial Court, because in my political position in the party as the labour relations officer, the labour relations committee developed a paper on this exact issue and the general council of the PNM accepted it.”
Whereas Baptiste-Primus says she is hopeful the amendments to the bill could be laid in Parliament before year’s end, she said several key stakeholders had not seen the IRAC report.
“I just had a discussion with Dr Catherine Kumar of the T&T Chamber of Industry and Commerce and also Nirad Tewarie of Amchan, even the Employers Consultative Association, that they did not have a copy of this report, which is from 2013. Now I am amazed. I was acting on the presumption and I shouldn’t have done that, that they had seen it.
“So they have requested some time in terms of meeting with their own memberships before submitting their comments, and I intend to accommodate it. The process will be slowed down, but it is a situation that I have to understand.”
Baptiste-Primus said the legislative changes were needed to bring T&T industrial relations laws up to ILO standards.