Don Robotham | Made in Jamaica: Wills Isaacs and the island’s economy

Diane Austin-Broos, professor emerita of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, Australia has written an impressive biography of Wills Isaacs titled Politics in a Small Island State. However, it is not the political aspects which interest me here. It is the remarkable account of the indefatigable efforts which Wills put out on the economic front, in particular his determined efforts to foster a manufacturing sector and the transformation of the tourist industry, which has not been equalled by any politician from either party since. ‘Made in Jamaica’ was Wills’ mantra, and he pursued this relentlessly.

ECONOMICS

The book has detailed accounts of Wills’ politics both as a councillor in the KSAC and in the rise of the People’s National Party (PNP) in the 1940s. Austin-Broos provides a clear and objective account of these rambunctious activities of ‘the Stormy Petrel’ or ‘Bishop’, as he was known, including his fiery and fierce confrontations with Bustamante. But, where this work really shines and becomes compulsory reading is in its account of Wills Isaacs as an early minister of trade and industry from 1955-62, and his tireless efforts to foster the development of a manufacturing sector in the Jamaican economy.

Wills Isaacs was very much a Jamaican brown man born in Hanover to small property holders and shopkeepers. At an early age, he moved to Kingston and established himself as a commission agent with his own firm of Samms, Isaacs and Sons. This was a time when the rising business community still lived downtown in areas such as Kingston Gardens, Rae Town, Rollington Town, and South Camp Road. The uptown/downtown division which we take for granted today did not yet exist.

We also forget how different the Jamaican economy was in the immediate post-war years and in 1955 when the PNP first came to power. Bauxite mining was only just getting underway, and we had an overwhelmingly agrarian economy dominated by sugar and banana plantations owned by large landowners. The counterpart to this was a mass of impoverished landless labourers and tenant farmers barely eking out a living on tiny parcels of land. The country was about 80 per cent rural compared to under 50% today. Margin gatherers occupied the choke points of the import economy – a chain of commission agents, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers, with each taking their cut before the goods finally reached the beleaguered consumer. The electricity system, such as it was, based on 40 cycles, was incapable of supporting industrialisation. This was the system which Wills Isaacs challenged head-on.

CLASSIC BATTLE

One classic battle was with the then established Jamaica Public Service Company. Austin-Broos recounts Wills’ many clashes with them in his effort to get them to upgrade from 40 to 50 cycles. Here, he was only partially successful – a salutary lesson for us today. He also pushed through the development of the industrial estate area along Marcus Garvey Drive and promoted every conceivable product, be it textiles and garments, shoes and leather goods, glass, washing soap and powder, coconut oil, dairy products, meat processing, soft drinks, beer, toothpaste, petroleum products, bauxite and alumina, car batteries, paint, cement, windows, doors, or prefabricated construction.

He travelled to Canada to negotiate down the price of imported salt fish. He explored trade and investment relationships with the then Czechoslovakia (Bata shoes) and with India and Nigeria. He was close to Edward Hanna, the Matalons, Carlton Alexander, and supported Abe Issa in the formation of the early Jamaica Tourist Board and the growth of a mass tourism industry. Wills took Arthur Lewis’ academic vision of ‘Industrialization with Unlimited Supplies of Labour’ into the realm of practical policy well before the Asian Tigers adopted Lewis’ export-led development strategy.

Austin-Broos is careful to give credit to early efforts by the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) to develop manufacturing. She records the excellent support which Wills received from his senior civil servants. She does not diminish the efforts of entrepreneurs themselves to whom, in the final analysis, Wills could only offer an ‘assist’. But none of this takes away from our admiration for this early practitioner of industrial policy. Wills delegated but was also in the weeds. The book tells the story of his struggle to get an investor to locate his factory in Black River. This failed because of the absence of 50-cycle electricity and the lack of maintenance infrastructure in the area.

MIXED RESULTS

Wills reaped impressive short-term success. Boosted by bauxite-alumina exports, Jamaica’s GDP growth reached 7.5 per cent annual average between 1955-62 – heights of which we can only dream today. Manufacturing expanded to contribute about 15 per cent to GDP (down to about nine per cent today). Yet, the economy was not transformed, and inequality soared. Why?

First, the policies were more about import-substitution growth than export-led development, and this required protective tariffs which discouraged competition and inevitably led to inefficiencies. Second, the energy issue was never solved. Third, the PNP’s educational policy did not focus on raising the technical level and productivity of the workforce. It was a grammar-school one, intended to create a professional middle class. Fourth, the countryside where the mass of people lived was never the focus of economic modernisation. Rural-urban migration soared. leading to the expansion of Kingston ghettos, and, ironically, to the undermining of the PNP’s political base in the Corporate Area. Wills also did not promote black entrepreneurship but worked with the existing mercantile group largely drawn from ethnic minorities.

The global economic environment was changing rapidly, especially in Asia, and would change even more drastically after the Nixon shock of 1971 and the collapse of protectionism. Our cheap labour was not as cheap as elsewhere, and was in contradiction to our commitment to greater unionisation and better wages and working conditions. So, we quickly became uncompetitive, especially given our costly and inadequate energy supply and the high price of oil. Often, the cost of imported inputs exceeded the local value-added. Many factories were, in fact, ‘screwdriver’ operations ready to jump ship at the slightest loss of market advantage. The low-tech, low-wage growth model had exhausted itself.

Although a fervent nationalist, his cultural world, like Norman Manley’s, was the Anglosphere — the US, Canada, UK, Australia — the Commonwealth. He imposed the trade ban on apartheid South Africa in 1958 (the first country to do so), but the Non-Aligned Movement of 1955 with Nkrumah was not in his universe. He was anti-Federation, much less to think of expanding economic ties to our Hispanic neighbours. He was who he was, and his immense contribution should not be forgotten.

Don Robotham is professor of anthropology and founding director of the advanced research collaborative of the graduate centre, City University of New York. He was pro vice chancellor for graduate studies and research at The UWI. Send feedback to drobotham@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com