Scotland knocks ‘callous’ treatment of fired workers

Opposition Leader Pennelope Beckles and the Port of Spain South MP Keith Scotland at his back to school drive distribution on August 22. - Angelo Marcelle

Port of Spain South MP Keith Scotland has appealed to the government to put measures in place for the CEPEP, URP and Reforestation workers who were fired in July 2025.

Speaking to media at his office’s book drive on Picadilly Street, Port of Spain on August 22, Scotland said there had been an influx of requests for assistance since the firings.

“Forget about the contractors – what about the workers? They are on the breadline and those are the people who don’t have normal matriculated skills, for A’Levels, Math and English now, in a way, you need to empower yourselves, you need to access programmes that the PNM government implemented. “You can’t turn a blind eye to this conversation, you have to put that in place. There will always be that vulnerable subset of society that needs to be taken care of. TT is not unique in that way, and that is why under a PNM government, social development had one of the major shares of the budget, because the PNM understood this. Not that we want to keep people like that, but we want to balance.”

Scotland asked if the government could not have dealt with investigating perceived corruption at CEPEP in a way that could have left people employed.

“Up to now, there has been a lot of fury, and nothing has been unearthed. File going to DPP, all kinds of things happening, but what has come of it? Zero, and zero would come of it.

“But I wouldn’t want the workers to come to zero, and if this continues that is exactly what they will come to, but not if I have anything to do with it, and not if the Leader of the Opposition has anything to do about it. We will fight in the court, we will fight in the streets, we will fight.” Opposition Leader Pennelope Beckles, who came to support Scotland for the book drive, also expressed concern about how the firings of CEPEP affected not only the individual workers but also the country.

“If we think about the data, an average family is three-four people and we could understand what an impact that would have in any community. I think, for me, one of the worst decisions government could have taken was sending home all of these people, especially women, single mothers, and look at the time they sent them home, they sent them home just before school.”

She said while the government may have given these parents an extra week in September to be able to get supplies, she asked what happened when they could not pay their bills.

“It’s not just about the education and the schoolbooks, a lot of them are paying rent. It’s not big rent but a lot of them are paying rent, a lot of them live, really every time they get that fortnightly cheque, or weekly, they go to the grocery. Some of us don’t understand that it’s real for these people when you cannot do the basic things for your children.”

Beckles said the government needed to say what their alternative is to CEPEP, especially as it related to the environment and cleanliness of the country.

“We need to find out, what are you putting in place for these 30,000-plus people you have sent home? When you think about CEPEP and URP, these are in most instances very simple people with very simple lives and really doing all they can in a very honest way to look after not just their families, but to look after the country.

“You can go to any part of TT and see the impact of the sending home of the CEPEP workers as it relates to the environment and the cleanliness of TT. I went to a funeral recently in La Fillette and going through Maracas, you could barely see, the sides of the road are just bush, bush, bush. Is the government really comfortable with that? And it’s not just Maracas, it’s all over TT now, to the point that some of their own supporters are seeing the impact of the absence of CEPEP in the country.”

Scotland said the language being used to describe the fired workers was concerning.

“When you look at the callousness and some of the comments coming from ministers of government, calling people ‘collateral damage’, there’s something very troubling about that to us. They’re not seeing people as human beings, but as collateral damage, that is very worrisome and I hope TT takes note of that because to me, that does not augur well for a country and for its people. When you juxtapose those statements, ‘grass-cutters,’ ‘dogs’, ‘collateral damage’, what message are we really sending, who is winning now when you call people ‘dogs’?”

Scotland said he expected over 1,200 residents of his constituency to access the book drive, where children were given schoolbags with stationery, notebooks/copybooks, lunch bags and water bottles.