They said the protest action will go ahead of no concrete union is reached during a meeting being attended by Labour Minister Karl Hood and the TUC executive. *Photo credit: www.caribbeantravelweb.com

ST GEORGE’S, Grenada, CMC – The Trade Union Congress (TUC) is threatening to picket the Maurice Bishop International Airport on Friday in support of 17 workers who have been told that they will lose their jobs at the end of this month.

The eight unions that make up the umbrella grouping are peeved at a decision to make the female workers, whose jobs involve cleaning aircraft, redundant effective February 1.

They said the protest action will go ahead of no concrete union is reached during a meeting being attended by Labour Minister Karl Hood and the TUC executive.

The workers have been employed by Airport Services of Grenada (ASG) but a local firm, Gibbs Cleaning Services, has now been contracted to clean the planes.

“The union is not accepting this. All 17 workers must get back their jobs and the letters must be withdrawn,” warned Oscar Williams, the general secretary of the Grenada Manual Maritime and Intellectual Workers Union (GMMIWU).

“Today, I want to make it officially known that we are getting support from our TUC brothers and sisters and we are willing to go further because our brothers and sisters are giving us solidarity because this is just a start,” he added.

The workers, led by the GMMIWU, picketed Parliament during the recent presentation of the 2010 budget by Finance Minister Nazim Burke and have also written to Prime Minister Tillman Thomas seeking his intervention in the matter.

Trade Unions in the country have been condemning the plan by ASG to release the workers, who have said they are willing to accept a 20 per cent pay cut to keep their jobs.

“I see this as an attack on the industrial peace in this country at this time of economic downturn because we are talking about 17 women, most of whom are the main bread winners in their home,” said George Mason, the general secretary of the Commercial and Industrial Workers Union.

“We are talking about women between the ages of 37 and 45 and this is why we are giving solidarity. The women are willing to go the extra mile and are willing to accept a reduced salary,” he added.

ASG, a statutory corporation, has not commented on the dispute and management officials have not returned telephone calls.

The GMMIWU has said that it has been trying to resolve the matter since last October but complains that it has been ignored by the Ministry of Labour.

“Statutory bodies have been losing monies and trying to justify their operation by trying to stream line. Things could have been done differently,” the Labour Minister told reporters.

“We are trying to see how we can bring this to a place where both sides can be happy but negotiations should have been done before we got to this point,” he added.