Trying to balance “true facts” and “false facts” and the new American concept “alternate truths” is like trying to distinguish “industrial action” under the wording of the IRA (which can itself be somewhat convoluted), including a “go slow,” a “work to rule” and “a sickout,” all of which can be regarded as “illegal work stoppages,” but not, at least not formally, one of those protests where everybody in a work unit, one by one, in sequence, takes a “bathroom break.”
Funny old things, words, aren’t they? They bounce and change and play games with your mind. One day they mean one thing, the next day they mean something else entirely.
One day the word “gay” means “song and dance and here we go round the mulberry bush" and a proud designation of the Desperadoes Steel Orchestra, and the next thing you know it has implications about someone’s sexual orientation.
One day, staying away from work after your usual fully paid two-month break is called “rest and reflection” (well, doesn’t everybody?) and the next thing you know someone is telling you that that is against the law for people like you who are regarded as “essential” servants of the country, and who have the future of the country in the nation’s children’s bookbags and laptops.
And to pile Pelion on Ossa, you don’t get paid for the day you didn’t work! Talk about unfair!
It could, of course, be because of the pesky section of that pesky law that states: “Nothing…shall be construed as imposing on an employer any obligation to pay any for any services of a worker that are withheld as a result of strike action taken in conformity with this part.” But if the action is taken not in conformity, as the rest-and-reflection action was, can you nonetheless expect to cry: “Not fair!” if you find your payslip is missing a day’s wages?
Confusing, isn’t it?
And then the Honourable Prime Minister claimed that Trinis are not disciplined enough to work from home! One assumes that he was referring to a mandatory system of public servants working from home.
He tried that with the public service last year and the year before, didn’t he? Off and on? One wonders who advises him in these matters.
[caption id="attachment_978969" align="alignnone" width="1024"] MAIN PHOTOPublic servants head to work at the Inland Revenue Division, Port of Spain when government announced the full return of workers after working from home during the pandemic lockdown in October 2020. File photo/Sureash Cholai[/caption]
There was the working-every-other-day system in the public service that didn’t work, so maybe he was right. There were letters ad complaints on radio talk shows and the press and so on claiming that whole departments in the service didn’t work on either their days on or their days off.
I cannot verify the truth of this, because I am not in that service and so have to work every day. But I can verify that either their phones didn’t work anymore, or no one was there to answer them because I tried.
In the private sector there was a technological trick that people schedu
