THE National Union of Public Workers (NUPW) did everything it could to get a pay increase for public servants in this island.
Making this claim was President of the NUPW, Akanni McDowall, who noted however that with Parliament now dissolved, and with Government’s decision earlier this week that there will be no salary increases or negotiations on such, the options available to the union are limited.
“The only thing that we can do now is to my mind, prepare something that the next incoming government knows what it needs to fulfil,” he said.
He outlined that the union, which had been pressuring Government for a pay increase of 23 per cent for civil servants, was already in the process of preparing a manifesto that would detail what it expected from the newly elected government for public workers.
Meanwhile, the executive councils of the NUPW and the Barbados Workers’ Union are scheduled to meet next week to discuss the situation and their next move.
However, while speaking on a radio programme yesterday, McDowall refused to concede that the union had failed in its fight for a salary hike over the past few years.
“If you looked back honestly at all of the things that the Union would have been able to do to work towards that objective, nobody can say to us that we would not have done everything within our means to ensure that public servants received a salary increase. We did marches, we attended the Social Partnership meeting, we put forward our position, we joined with the other unions, we had our Black Friday event, we called workers out to take industrial action, so all of those steps were taken in order for us to achieve our objectives,” he remarked. (JMB)