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HOME	OCTOBER 01st, 2005

Hon. Claris Charles, M.P.,
Minister for Labour et al,
C/o Ministry of Education
Botanical Gardens,
Tanteen, St. George.

Dear Madam,

The Technical and Allied Workers' Union acknowledges receipt of your letter dated September 20th, 2005 which was received by our office via fax on September 20th, 2005 at 3:48 p.m.

It is indeed regrettable that you have indefinitely postponed the mediation meeting, which was set to take place on Thursday, September 22nd, 2005, pursuant to the resolution of a labour dispute involving the Consolidated Contractors Company and the Technical and Allied Workers' Union in a matter having to deal with a deadlock in negotiating a new Contract for the period January 1st, 2003 to December 31st, 2005

You may not be aware that the Union sent proposals to this Company on September 30th, 2003 and negotiations began on February 2nd, 2004. You no doubt must be further aware that as a Construction Company workers are released in keeping with the progress of the particular construction project.

When the Union sent you a letter on June 15th, 2005 invoking your intervention in accordance with the Labour Relations Act, Section 1 and Section 2 (e) as amended, you took absolutely no steps to meet your statutory responsibilities.

The Union then sent you a letter on August 10th - well pass the thirty (30) day time frame as set out in the Act - with a petition signed by over one hundred and fifty (150) workers appended to our letter.

Up to today you have patently refused, even out of well-established courtesies, to acknowledge the correspondence sent to you in your official capacity as the Minister for Labour.

By virtue of your letter under reference, you have resorted to extraneous issues having absolutely nothing to do with your statutory obligations under the Labour Relations Act,

We wish to remind you that as a public official you are required to function under the law and to make it clear, for the avoidance of confusion, that the Technical and Allied Workers' Union is a bona fide registered Trade Union holding a Certificate of Recognition as Bargaining Agent for the workers employed by CCC and that the representation lying before you is one which arises from the very amendments to the Labour Relations Act which your Government passed into law.

No one from the Technical and Allied Workers' Union or myself for that matter, has made, is making, or will be making, any personal representative before your good self on matters pertaining to CCC.

Pen ultimately, the pamphlet, which you referred to in your letter, is an official document of our Union addressed to its members and neither I nor the Union or anyone else in the Union is constrained in circulating it to members.

Its contents are accurate and we have challenged you to provide evidence that our office was contacted about any mediation meeting connected to the dispute with CCC.

In order to corroborate our position, I refer you to our letter of September 16th addressed to you to assist in verifying whether or not your office contacted the Chief Shop Steward of Grenada Cablevision Limited - Mr. Peter Cox and whether it contacted the office of the General manager of Cablevision - Mr. Hugh Dolland, to advise them of a postponement of a meeting arising from the inability of Mr. Gordon Raeburn - Chief Grievance Officer and 1st Vice President of TAWU, to attend a matter having to do with Cablevision.

Therein lies the simple explanation to this non issue and we repeat our public statement that you 'lied' when you said that we were contacted for a meeting dealing with the CC dispute.

Thus, neither the Technical and Allied Workers' Union nor I have any apology to offer and we urge you to get on with the substantial business of addressing the dispute involving almost three hundred workers.

In closing this letter, we think it appropriate to ask the question why the delays in addressing the CCC dispute.

Many workers are openly expressing the view that by dragging your feet on this matter the Company is surreptitiously being given an advantage in that it can speedily conclude significant aspects of the construction thus weakening the impact of any strike or industrial action but we are reluctant to share this observation - it is just however, something we ponder.

Please be assured of our highest consideration and we repeat our call to convene a mediation meeting of the parties urgently in compliance with the law.

Chester Humphrey
President General

CC: Grenada Trades' Union Council
Grenada Conference of Churches
Grenada Employers Federation
TAWU Members
Media