Trinidad man lost job and got shock­ing news of triplets on the same day

(Trinidad Guardian) On the day Dale Lemessy got his let­ter of re­trench­ment, he got the shock­ing news that his wife Dana was hav­ing triplets.

He start­ed to shake and felt sick in his stom­ach. They al­ready had three chil­dren- aged 12, sev­en and two-years-old – to care for and with three more on the way, Lemessy was wor­ried about how he would put food on the ta­ble.

 
To make mat­ters worse, Lemessy al­leged that his em­ploy­er In­land and Off­shore Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed nev­er paid him a cent of sev­er­ance.

His sev­er­ance cal­cu­lat­ed in March was $83,000 and this brought a bit of so­lace, but as the preg­nan­cy pro­gressed and no sev­er­ance was paid, Lemessy grew de­spon­dent. Every week he would go to his em­ploy­ers beg­ging them to pay.

Now that the ba­bies are born and Dana is hos­pi­talised, Lemessy has joined 20 of his col­leagues to take le­gal ac­tion against the com­pa­ny.

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia on Thurs­day, Lemessy said he was dis­ap­point­ed that IO­CL had failed to pay sev­er­ance as promised.

“I worked since 2007 for the com­pa­ny and I was paid $37 an hour. Be­tween 2012 to 2019, our ne­go­ti­a­tions were tied up in court so we nev­er had any in­creas­es. I feel very un­hap­py about this. I called my boss­es to let them know I now had six chil­dren to main­tain and they told me that Petrotrin owes them mon­ey and if that mon­ey is not paid, they can­not pay sev­er­ance,” Lemessy said.

In des­per­a­tion, he spoke to his coun­cil­lor Shankar Teelucks­ingh last week, who or­gan­ised le­gal as­sis­tance from at­tor­ney Ger­ald Ramdeen.

Teelucks­ingh said that each of the work­ers was giv­en a let­ter of re­trench­ment which in­clud­ed a cal­cu­la­tion of sev­er­ance. How­ev­er, he said yes­ter­day, many of them have not re­ceived any mon­ey.

“Not a sin­gle step has been tak­en or ini­ti­at­ed by the Min­istry of Labour or the union to en­sure that the work­ers re­ceive what they are en­ti­tled to by law. They have been suf­fer­ing with­out an in­come for more than six months,” he ex­plained.

Teelucks­ingh said those who re­ceived sev­er­ance were heav­i­ly taxed even though their ben­e­fits did not cross the spec­i­fied tax break.

“The com­pa­ny said they got a di­rec­tive from the Board of In­land Rev­enue to tax the sev­er­ance but un­der the law, the BIR does not tax sev­er­ance that cross­es $300,000. These ben­e­fits did not ac­crue to that amount yet they still faced heavy tax­es from the com­pa­ny,” Teelucks­ingh al­leged.

He added that six months have passed since the last set of re­trench­ment took place and work­ers were still wait­ing for their mon­ey.

“To­day em­ploy­ees are strug­gling to meet their com­mit­ments to the banks, to send their chil­dren to school, to pro­vide for their fam­i­lies and to meet their most ba­sic needs.  This they must face with­out any as­sis­tance from the gov­ern­ment, the Min­is­ter or Labour or the State. Be­fore the clo­sure of Petrotrin, the gov­ern­ment was warned that the rip­ple ef­fect of this de­ci­sion would force un­em­ploy­ment of thou­sands of work­ers. That re­al­i­ty has come to pass,” Teelucks­ingh said.

He ex­plained that all of the re­trenched work­ers will be tak­ing in­di­vid­ual le­gal ac­tion against the com­pa­ny for fail­ure to pay sev­er­ance.

IO­CL was one of the three main con­trac­tors which pro­vid­ed ma­rine trans­port to Petrotrin’s Trin­mar Op­er­a­tions.

In a let­ter of re­trench­ment ob­tained by the Guardian, IO­CL stat­ed, “Once our con­tract with Petrotrin is ter­mi­nat­ed, all po­si­tions will be­come re­dun­dant.” Ef­forts to con­tact  IO­CL’s Hu­man Re­source and In­dus­tri­al Re­la­tions con­sul­tant Suren Dook­ie proved fu­tile as calls to the of­fice lines went unan­swered.