Trade unions and econ­o­mists are sound­ing the alarm over Trinidad and To­ba­go’s em­ploy­ment out­look, af­ter of­fi­cial da­ta showed near­ly 6,000 jobs dis­ap­peared in the first three months of 2026, warn­ing that the im­pact stretch­es far be­yond the labour mar­ket and in­to house­holds, busi­ness­es and the wider econ­o­my.

The lat­est Labour Force Sur­vey pub­lished by the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice (CSO) showed em­ploy­ment fell from 569,900 peo­ple in the fourth quar­ter of 2025 to 564,000 in the first quar­ter of 2026, a de­cline of 5,900 jobs or one per cent.The fig­ures come months af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar an­nounced that more than 15,000 jobs had been cre­at­ed since her ad­min­is­tra­tion took of­fice 16 months ear­li­er.

The CSO re­port­ed: “In quar­ter one 2026, the es­ti­mat­ed av­er­age num­ber of per­sons with jobs for all sec­tors was 564,000. Com­pared to the fourth quar­ter of 2025, the over­all em­ploy­ment across all in­dus­tries de­creased by one per cent.”