Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves’ back is against the wall and his government is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
That is the view of St Vincent and the Grenadines Teachers’ Union’s president Oswald Robinson as expressed at a joint press conference hosted at his union’s headquarters and included the Public Service Union (PSU) and the Police Welfare Association (PWA) on Monday.
The press conference was held to inform the nation of legal proceedings being instituted by legal counsels amid the dismissal of frontline workers in the public service on the matter of the government’s vaccine mandate.
Ahead of the press conference, the union leader said Monday that over 100 teachers had up to that point received letters of dismissal of which 44 had submitted their letters to the union for documentation.
Prime Minister Gonsalves announce recently that authorities had been employing persons, including retired teachers and untrained graduates, to replace those who have been dismissed.
The government had issued an ultimatum for workers, who are considered to be frontline, to take the Covid-19 vaccine by November 19, 2021, failing which they were barred from the workplace. The workers were granted a period of 10 days after November 19 to take the vaccine and return to work, failing which they were deemed to have abandoned their job.
“So we know his back is against the wall right now, the government scraping the bottom of the barrel, the lowest part of the barrel. And they cannot put up the kind of fight that they ought to in this time so they’re doing all sort of things – monies being shared away, you have retired teachers going back into the primary schools to teach among those who are untrained and going back to teach.
“So we want everybody to understand that we know these things are happening and he will do anything else because a drowning man will clutch at a straw. But let us stay united, let us stay focused. We’re fighting against mandatory vaccination, that is the issue. And once we stay together, we will send that clear message to him that enough is enough,” Robinson told reporters on Monday afternoon.
Robinson said that the presence of the legal counsels at the press conference was testimony of their promise to challenge the Statutory Rule and Order SR&O) published in the Government Gazette a few months ago to operationalize the vaccine mandate following the passage of a bill to amend the Public Health Act on August 6th, 2021.
“We promised our membership that and that’s what we are doing here today. But we are also doing it from other angles – protests. We have other organizations writing. The CUT (Caribbean Union of Teachers) would have written to the Prime Minister, he never responded. We wrote to him, he never responded.
“And we will do everything within the confines of the law to show him what we really mean about interfering with the constitution of St Vincent and the Grenadines and the other legal instruments that counsel would have spoken about,” Robinson said.