National Gas Company yesterday issued severance letters to 15 contract workers and redeployed 69 others within the company, as the 100 per cent state-owned company signed a contract with Spanish energy giant to lease two 34-year-old compression platforms off Trinidad’s southeast coast.
Some 84 NGC employees spent yesterday locked in day-long meetings with NGC management, being briefed on their future with the company.
The majority of them, 69 in all, will be offered training to take up new positions in other parts of the company. Fifteen of them will be let go, after being offered severance packages. Recognising the financial hardship it will cause, the workers are to be offered financial planning and counselling services.
It follows an agreement between NGC and Spanish energy company Repsol, under which Repsol is being leased NGC’s Teak and Poui platforms, which were commissioned in 1982 to collect and compress low pressure natural gas for sale.
Repsol E&P T&T on Tuesday offered some 190 of its employees voluntary separation packages.
A day of tense encounters started with workers returning from offshore duties on the Teak and Poui platforms just after 7 am, to be met by NGC officials at the National Helicopter Services Limited (NHSL) Heliport, Camden, Couva.
They were asked to attend a meeting with management at Cara Suites in Claxton Bay. The T&T Guardian went to the hotel and observed the fact that NGC had conference room bookings at the hotel from 6.30 am to 5 pm.
The workers were brought to the hotel in small groups, and met by NGC officials in the lobby. They were then escorted to conference rooms where they were briefed by NGC officials and given their respective letters. Once they had received their brown envelopes, they were escorted to the waiting buses and transported back to either the NGC's headquarters in Point Lisas in Couva or to the heliport.
Company softens the blow
NGC's Teak and Poui platforms have been in operation for 34 years and according to NGC Chairman, Gerry Brooks, the platforms were expensive to run, and were loss-making operations. Industry sources indicated that the compression platforms racked up losses of close to $200 million a year and were considered to be haemorrhaging NGC.
While choosing his words carefully, Brooks left no doubt that the leasing of the platforms was a significant cost-cutting exercise, that included shedding jobs.
“The lease agreement allows NGC to rationalise costs while maintaining strategic ownership of the asset for the future,” Brooks said in an interview with the T&T Guardian yesterday.
The 69 workers to have been offered alternative positions within the NGC Group represent 82 per cent of the affected employees, he said.
Of the 69, 30 of them—just under half—are to given opportunities “to enhance technical skills and capabilities provided by a partnership with the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT),” in other words, given technical/vocational training to give them other options in the job market.
These certified programmes are to be funded by NGC and will span a 12 to 18 month period.
“This deliberate retraining effort is required to ‘upskill’ employees for the new challenges and opportunities in the Group,” Brooks said.
Brooks said that the company did everything they could to soften the blow for the 15 contract workers let go.
“NGC has met and even exceeded legal requirements to ensure the transition into new external opportunities.”
“They have been offered enhanced severance packages. Investment and financial planning training and counselling services will also be provided to them,” Brooks said.
Workers unhappy
T&T Guardian understands that the contract workers, who were sent home were given a severance of two weeks for each year of employment. The workers have electrical, instrumental and mechanical skills and their service ranged from three to ten years.
Those who were given re-deployment notices were only for the period from April 25, 2016 to June 30, 2016.
Speaking to the T&T Guardian yesterday, a worker who was redeployed and who wished not to be identified, said that he and his colleagues feel as though they are being sent to the “dog house.”
“It means that we are being sent to other departments where we will be forced to pick up duties that we will surely be too highly qualified for. We feel like we have been betrayed, after working so dedicatedly for NGC over the years. We are now being put to change bulbs, wash cars, refill water. We have families to take care of and lives to live too. They are frustrating us,” the re-deployed worker said.
“How could that be a possible excuse when we saw that last year the company made (billions of) dollars in profit? Yes, the next year they made $2 billion less in profit but they still made a profit! This is so unfair all because they first wanted to sell the assets and now saying it is leased but where are the leased notices?
“We never saw it, how do we know that it is really leased and not sold? Where were the public tenders for all of this - sale or lease? The workers are being betrayed and that is how we feel,” the worker added.
“What happens to us after June 30? Would we be then called and say to pack our bags and go home?,” the worker added.