Trinidad oil workers union warn off foreign, private investors in state entities

In an era when governments in the Caribbean are actively wooing foreign private investment without so much as an opposing murmur from the governed, opposition to takeover of state entities by either local or foreign private investors has the support of the most powerful trade union in Trinidad and Tobago.

Last week Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) President General Ancel Roget attracted a fair measure of media attention when he used his address to an event held to mark the Union’s 80th anniversary to discourage multinational companies from seeking to take over local state enterprises through privatization.

The union boss said in his presentation that the OWTU’s position on privatization of state entities had remained unchanged from almost four decades ago when it spearheaded a regimen of agitation for the expulsion of Texaco from the country’s oil and gas industry. In his address Roget said that his union had now shifted attention from expatriate entities to local businesses bent on emulating foreign investors.

Established in 1937 the OWTU, which represents workers in the state-run oil and gas sector, is regarded as the most powerful trade union in the country.

Seemingly invoking the pro nationalization economic doctrine that obtained under the Forbes Burnham administration in Guyana during the decade of the 1970s, Roget used his address to remind trade union colleagues of the struggles to take control of the commanding heights of the economy.

The veteran trade unionist refuted the views of local analysts who contend that the best prescription for modern Trinidad and Tobago is the privatization of state entities. He contended that the commanding heights of the country’s economy having passed from the hands of foreign