Job hands to collect garbage: Minister

Job hands, including ex-convicts, prison inmates and Psychiatric Hospital patients, are to be used by the Sanitation Service Authority in a bid to address a shortage of sanitation workers, Environment Minister Trevor Prescod has told reporters.

Speaking to the media during a tour of the Blue-Green Initiative, Prescod revealed that job hands had been brought on to address a worrying number of shortages, caused by a significant number of SSA employees who have retired, as well as those who have gone on leave.

But the Minister ruled out hiring additional staff owing to Government’s current financial position.

Prescod told reporters: “I will have these people here sometimes on standby because if you have a truck, and I am not dealing with any specific case, but I can’t afford to have a truck at the Sanitation not working because I don’t even have enough to do what I have to do.

“So I can’t have a truck that is working and the truck is parked in the yard because I don’t have a driver, or even if I have the driver I don’t have the two loaders to be there.”

Prescod said the additional help would include former patients of the Psychiatric Hospital as well as former convicts who served time in prison. He disclosed that inmates at Dodds were currently repairing some SSA equipment.

He explained those otherwise marginalised people who were often overlooked for jobs were being given the opportunity.

Prescod declared: “I have the young men and women at Dodds working on repairs and building skips and some of those skips will be in certain strategic areas quickly.

“I don’t want to put a deadline on it but you are going to see it within a week.”

Having previously acknowledged a shortage of trucks at the SSA, the Minister said one truck was currently at the Port while a further four would soon be ordered.

Prescod said he was doing everything in his power to get the fleet up an optimum number of 35 trucks.

To date, seven trucks have already been imported.

The Minister said: “At present, I have one truck in the Harbour and I have some equipment as well in the Harbour and hopefully we will get whatever we have there in a short space of time so we are on our way.

“I am also going to promise you that I am going to work as quickly as possible on adding an additional four trucks because I am trying to get the fleet back up to 35.”

Additionally, the Minister said chassis for a number of trucks were in the US being retrofitted. But he said he would be unable to give a timeline as to when those vehicles would be on the island.

The initiatives have come three days
after Prescod told Barbados TODAY the SSA’s board of management was scheduled to meet to decide on a range of likely solutions.

He said then: “The board will be meeting, and a number of decisions will be made. I am not going to pre-empt the board decisions, they have proposals before them and some would be rejected and some would be approved.”