Orville Taylor | Labour in focus

Two labour parties in Parliament, for whatever bizarre reason, decided in 2011 to remove from the Jamaican Constitution the very foundation of their existence.

How dumb must this move was. True, the committee comprised some of the most brilliant minds from both political parties. However, somebody dropped the ball. In fact, each dropped both.

The result is, that a message was sent to the working class, that Parliament had lost its way, and thus, is still reaping the whirlwind.

For the record, political parties, being ‘workers’ parties, is supposed to be the essence of their existence. Around 1907, Marcus Garvey formed a print workers’ union and initiated a strike in order to achieve improved wages and conditions of employment of Jamaican workers in that industry.

Though unsuccessful, it demonstrated the importance of placing workers’ concerns at the centre of political and development agendas.

After his deportation and return, Garvey founded the People’s Political Party (PPP) and in 1929, published his manifesto.

One explicit plank was for workers to form trade unions and then use them to establish political parties. Equipped with legislative power, they could then pass laws, which benefited the majority of the society, the working class.

This was before the formation of the People’s National Party (PNP) in 1938 and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in 1943.

Sharp on the heels of the 1938 uprisings, with union leader Alexander Bustamante as a member, the PNP was inaugurated in September of that year.

After splitting with the PNP, he used the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU) as the platform to launch the JLP in 1943 and won the first democratic election in the western hemisphere.

Although the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was an unofficial arm of the PNP, after it purged some of its left-leaning leaders, it formed the National Workers Union (NWU) in 1952.

Both the BITU and NWU have voting rights in the governance structure of the parties.

CHARTER WAS INSERTED

Somehow, one week after Tom Fool’s day, the Charter was inserted into the Constitution. While it doubtless made some improvements, such as enshrined freedom from discrimination, based on being male or female, it inexplicably removed Section 23.

In the earlier and current Section 13, among the myriad fundamental rights and freedoms is freedom of association. It reads, “…freedom of conscience, of expression and of peaceful assembly and association…” The section does not explicitly speak to its modalities. However, a number of cases, such as Collymore v The AG, and Banton v ALCOA minerals, flesh out what this means and its limitations.

Section 23, now excised, definitively spoke of the right to form and participate in trade unions.

Over the past three decades, there has been some disturbing trends in the Jamaican labour market.

Several features have emerged, which indicate that ‘decent work’ has been declining.

A concept of the International Labour Organization, decent work involves freedom from discrimination, arbitrary termination, exploitative or forced labour, human trafficking and child labour and the low-hanging fruit of freedom of association. Add to that, social protection, in the form of pensions and other terminal benefits. In essence, many of the things covered by our slew of labour laws.

Importantly, in order to benefit from decent work, one has to first of all qualify as a worker; and not an independent contractor. Beyond that, one should work, usually more than 20 hours in a seven-day week, in order to reach the minimal threshold for benefits to kick in.

Never mind the naysayers; measured very much as it was since the late 1980s, unemployment and labour force participation have improved. There is incontrovertible evidence, using the same matrices, that unemployment is the lowest it has been in our modern history.

TINY PART

Most significant is that the unionised workforce is now a very tiny part of the employed labour force. In the 1980s, the number of unionised workers was close to 25 per cent of the workforce.

At last measurement, and my feeling is that it is now smaller, it was around 17 per cent. It matches the pension data, where less than 18 per cent of Jamaicans have any pension plan or entitlement, outside of the National Insurance Scheme, which is so small, that it evaporates in the bucket.

Own account work and ‘contract’ work has steadily increased, and although still not the majority, it is profoundly affecting the terms and conditions of employment of many industries.

Contract workers, who provide labour under contracts for services, are immunised from the gains under all our labour statutes.

It gets worse. In 2000 only 14 per cent of Jamaican employees worked the unhealthy more than 48 hours per week. Currently this is around 26 per cent. At the other end of the continuum, the underemployed, working less than 35 hours per week, is 16 per cent.

More troublesome, in a region with the lowest tertiary enrolment in the hemisphere, Jamaica has a high youth unemployment rate and lots of disaffected youth and workers.

In fact, studies done a few years ago on employee engagement found that 60 per cent of disengaged workers were irretrievable.

More than 100,000 youth are neither in employment, education nor training (NEET). At least 660,000 are outside the labour force. In real terms the youth NEET rate is around 20 per cent of which youth unemployment is 16 per cent.

With the recognition that at the major universities, the male enrolment and graduation rates are 30 and 25 per cent, respectively, this must be worrisome.

After all, one of the best insulators against youth violence and gang membership (which account for 70 per cent of homicides), is post-secondary education.

Yet, decent work enables families to send boys to college, protect females from abuse at work and is directly connected to labour productivity.

Somebody got it totally wrong; both sides of Parliament are to be blamed.

As I said last week and consistently, the party that loses the working class invariably loses the election.

Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.