ADDRESS delivered by
Her Honour Mrs. Deborah Thomas-Felix
President Industrial Court of Trinidad and Tobago
at the Special Sitting of the Industrial Court for the 2020/2021 Law Term
Good morning everyone. Thank you for sharing a moment of your time with us at this virtual opening of the Law Term of the Industrial Court for the year 2020/21.
We live in difficult times where the world is experiencing severe social, economic and environmental challenges such as climate change, youth unemployment, gender and economic inequality, refugees and migration issues, a decline in the demand for oil and gas and now, the COVID-19 pandemic. We know that throughout the course of history, pandemics and plagues have wreaked havoc on humanity and sometimes they have changed the course of history. Today, humanity is being ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This pandemic is causing an unprecedented scale of global disruption in the workplace. It has also created an unprecedented reduction in economic activities, productivity and working time, with severe impact on incomes and jobs, and has resulted in a significant rise in unemployment and underemployment globally. There is continued damage to labour markets mainly due to the imposition of lockdown measures which have been adopted to control the pandemic, including various forms of workplace closures. These workplace closures and the implementation of other containment measures, combined with the rapid deterioration of economic conditions, have caused immediate and massive losses in work hours in the first three quarters of 2020.
According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), as at 15th June this year, most of a third of the world’s workers which is thirty-two percent, were living in countries which required workplace closures for all but essential workplaces. An additional forty-two percent were living in countries which required workplace closures for some sectors or categories of workers and a further nineteen percent lived in countries with recommended workplace closures. Taken together, the vast majority, namely ninety-three percent of the world’s workers, continue to reside in countries with workplace closure measures of some kind still enforced.