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The Na­tion­al Trade Union Cen­tre (NATUC) is stand­ing in sol­i­dar­i­ty with over 10,500 ter­mi­nat­ed Com­mu­ni­ty-Based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (CEPEP) work­ers. Fur­ther­more, it is call­ing on Gov­ern­ment to ab­sorb the work­ers in­to the ex­ist­ing con­trac­tu­al frame­work of the com­pa­ny un­til it re­solves is­sues it has high­light­ed.

This fol­lows wide­spread fear and un­cer­tain­ty ex­pressed by af­fect­ed work­ers yes­ter­day, af­ter they re­port­ed to work and were fi­nal­ly told by the ter­mi­nat­ed con­trac­tors that they no longer had jobs. The con­trac­tors re­ceived their ter­mi­na­tion let­ters on Fri­day but the ma­jor­i­ty of them on­ly of­fi­cial­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed what this meant to work­ers yes­ter­day.

In a re­lease yes­ter­day, while NATUC gen­er­al sec­re­tary Michael An­nisette ac­knowl­edged Gov­ern­ment’s con­cerns about poor gov­er­nance in the pro­gramme un­der the for­mer Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment ad­min­is­tra­tion, he said work­ers should not be pun­ished for the al­leged mis­con­duct of po­lit­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed con­trac­tors.