This article was first published in the Trinidad Express Newspapers on March 30th 2018. Fiction spreads farther and faster than the truth was the headline in the UK Economist magazine reporting on research done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Social Machines. Apparently social media via the internet works almost as fast as a Trini grapevine […]
This article was first published in the Trinidad Express Newspapers on March 15th 2018. When it comes to methods of controlling human behaviour, the Gaslight method ranks among the most effective. It works as well on intelligent people as it does on those P.T. Barnum referred to as :”the suckers that are born every minute”. The name comes […]
This article was first published in the Trinidad Express Newspapers on January 1st 2018. When my granddaughter who is a typical Trini, of many mixed ethnicities, announced that she was leaving Trinidad and moving to New York, I was apprehensive. Trump’s USA is no place for people of colour, I thought, but she was adamant. […]
This article was first published in the Trinidad Express Newspapers on December 31st 2017. I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America That was written […]
This article was first published in the Trinidad Express Newspapers on December 12th 2017 Sir Terry Pratchett, reputedly the foremost satirical writer of the 21st century, knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his contribution to literature, placed many of his hilarious stories in “The Century of the Fruit Bat”. I am not sure when he visited […]
This Article was first published in the Trinidad Express Newspapers on November 16th 2017. On Sunday last two businessmen from Toronto came to T&T to check out the investment scene, and find out whether T&T could accommodate an international IT communications center they wanted to set up. One was a tall dour legal fellow, and […]
THE QUESTION ABOUT WHETHER SOMEONE HAS BEEN CONSTRUCTIVELY DISMISSED IS ONE THAT ARISES MORE AND MORE FREQUENTLY. For those who want a very clear and definitive ruling on what constitutes constructive dismissal, one cannot do better than go to Lord Denning and we here do so, Quoting Lord Denning in Western Excavating (ECC) Ltd. V Sharp [1978] 1 […]
The term “progressive discipline” is often used in situations of industrial relations conflict where termination has taken place. This happens most often where the Industrial Court makes an award against an employer for not having dealt with the dismissal: “in accordance with the principles of good industrial relations” Progressive discipline is a graduated scale of disciplinary […]
Almost every week the press reports on yet another government enterprise “reorganizing” or “restructuring” which translated into English means retrenchment. While the weekly, or almost daily retrenchments in the private sector do not make the headlines, or get reported to the Minister of Labour as the Retrenchment and Severance Benefits Act only requires employers who […]
Employers are, with some justification, getting more and more nervous about dealing with employee grievances, given the multi-million dollars awards being given by the Industrial Court when they are messed up due to company mismanagement or just plain ignorance of good Industrial Relations practices. One of the sensitive areas before getting to a dismissal stage […]
