We need to get away from all these details and have a nice spirited document which is what Barbados did and it worked,” Evans stated. *Photo credit: cia.gov

ST GEORGE’S, Grenada, CMC – President of the Grenada Chamber of Industry and Commerce (GCIC), Justin Evans, has blamed petty wrangling and unfair demands on the government for the delay in agreeing a social protocol after a year at the negotiating table.

Evans has pointed at a dispute between non governmental organizations (NGOs) and the umbrella Trade Union Congress (TUC) as well as a demand for the Tillman Thomas government to guarantee a public bus service and a ferry service between Grenada and Trinidad as part of the pact.

“One of the big sticking points has been a fundamental disagreement that they should have been three or four parties as part of the social pact .Three of the four parties thought they should have been four and one of the parties thought they should be three and that created difficulty in moving forward,” Evans said.

The NGO community had launched a scathing attack on the TUC accusing the workers body of conspiring to it excluded from the talks, while the government and the TUC have also been at loggerheads over who was responsible for causing a breakdown in negotiations covering areas from retrenchment to severance pay.

“I struggle with why it cannot be concluded for the simple fact it is not a binding contract enforceable by law. It is an undertaking based on moral suasion. Quite frankly they are some things that have gone on that I really don’t understand,” Evans told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC).

“I don’t understand why we cannot say as a group this in general is what we want to do and quite frankly I think some of the things that certain entities have wanted the other to agree to have been kind of impractical given the situation we are in.

We need to get away from all these details and have a nice spirited document which is what Barbados did and it worked”.

Finance Minister Nazim Burke has not given a timeline but says talks on the social protocol are expected to resume soon and blamed recent delays on preparations for the 2010 estimates of revenues and expenditure presented in January.

However, the Finance Minister has declined to lay blame on a particular organisation and is insisting that talks to agree a social pact have not failed.

“I don’t want to say that the pact has failed or that the pact has died or language that suggest the end of the world.  What has happened is the last round of negotiations that we had did not manage to conclude an agreement and that is not abnormal,” Burke said.

“As far as the social protocol is concerned we have not yet been able to reach agreement and not every time you don’t reach an agreement there is somebody to be blamed .I do not wish to point a finger at anybody and I can’t point a finger at anybody for saying that it has failed for whatever reason”.

The efforts to forge a social protocol are been described as a response to the impact of the global economic recession on Grenada.