| Firefighters’ strike halts flights at Provo airport again | | Print | |
| Written by Richard Green/richard@fptci.com | |||
| Saturday, 10 March 2012 18:31 | |||
 One year after firefighters participating in a “sick out” shut down commercial flights to the Turks and Caicos Islands, some of them refused to work today (March 10), temporarily halting commercial flights and stranding tourists coming and going from Providenciales International Airport. At 5:16 p.m. March 10, government CEO Patrick Boyle issued a press release saying that firefighters from the airport on South Caicos were coming to Providenciales to replace the striking firefighters. Less than an hour later, commercial flights resumed. The strike began this morning, postponing a number of flights for about two hours. After several flights landed, the airport was closed again, forcing some flights to be rerouted to other countries. Hundreds of tourists waiting at the airport to leave had to stay another night, causing bedlam at many resorts that didn’t have enough rooms to accommodate them. The firefighters, who are civil servants and not employees of the Turks and Caicos Islands Airports Authority (TCIAA) which runs the airport, struck in protest of the way in which the government wants to move them from the civil service to the authority, an independent statutory entity. “This straightforward transfer would have guaranteed their continuity of service and preserved their terms and conditions, and allowed more coherent management at the airport,” Boyle said. “To be clear, the job expected of them and how they are financially rewarded would not change. “Responding to their demands today, I said that I would stop the transfer — they can stay as they are if that is what they prefer. However, the firefighters want to be made redundant from (government), for them to receive lump sum compensation payments totalling $3 million between them, and then for them to carry on doing the same job for the TCIAA. This is clearly not a good use of TCI taxpayers’ money.” The TCIAA issued a statement at 4 p.m. apologizing for the disruption of service. “These disruptions were caused by the refusal, and later abandonment of several fire officers from their post, which resulted in the suspension and downgrading of flight operations into aerodromes,” the authority said. “The TCIAA in consultation with Turks and Caicos Islands Government has made every effort to have staff return to their post in the interest of restoration of operations, the public and the TCI economy.” On March 24, 2011, some firefighters joined a sick out by hundreds of government workers protesting changes to the civil service by the interim government which is trying to bring down personnel costs that revenue cannot support.
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