ASEMBLANCE of calm returned to the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPSCo) yesterday after trade unions promised an end to work disruptions as part of an agreement to continue wage negotiations next week Thursday.

“We have agreed that normality will continue during that period and we have assured Horace Dalley,” said Dwight Nelson, vice-president of the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU).

He said that Dalley, the minister of labour and social security, had assured the unions that the JPSCo workers, who Wednesday defied a court injunction preventing them from going on strike for 30 days, would not be victimised or intimidated.

The short-lived strike had limited effect on the light and power company’s operations and did not result in the suspension of electricity services to the country.

Yesterday, after four days of see-saw negotiations with the four unions representing workers, JPSCo managers emerged in the afternoon from long meetings, saying that the talks were “positive”.

At the centre of the dispute is a claim by the unions — the National Workers Union, the BITU, the Union of Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Personnel and the Managers’ Association — that JPSCo must pay by Christmas, retroactive money owed to the workers.

The money, the unions say, is owed from January last year after a regrading of salaries from a job evaluation.

The evaluation started before the Government sold 80 per cent of the JPSCo for US$183 million to the American firm, Mirant Corporation, in March last year.

Yesterday, the company said feedback from the morning meetings revealed that there was some misunderstanding of the proposed implementation of the evaluation’s findings.

“One of the issues that the unions were concerned about is the placement of JPSCo workers in the market after the proposed implementation of the findings,” the company said.

“All market information available confirms that JPSCo’s compensation packages are among the most competitive in Jamaica. The company is not proposing to change that,” the firm said.

It also denied that it had proposed to pay employees at 50 per cent of the market and said that the philosophy being proposed by the company would allow workers to “earn at the very top of the market”.

However, Nelson challenged the claim, saying “It was a fact that they were heading towards that figure, if the unions did not intervene. Currently they are at 90 per cent and this is good, but they were planning on reducing that amount.”

Nelson also said that the JPSCo misunderstood the unions’ position on the effective date of the job evaluation implementation. “So, instead of the retroactive wages starting in 2001, they should start in 2002,” he said.