How businesses stayed afloat

As COVID-19 swept on to Jamaica’s shores, it sent off alarm bells, warning of the speedy collapse of many of the drivers of the economy, as industries scaled back or ground to a halt as restrictions sucked the oxygen out of commerce.

By March 24, 2020, hotels started shuttering as Jamaica imposed a ban on inbound passenger traffic. Schools closed almost two weeks earlier, wiping out a billion-dollar microeconomy that kept thousands of vendors, canteen and ancillary staff, and food suppliers afloat.

When islandwide curfews took effect, revenues dried up, causing businesses to tumble like a pack of bricks.

Business leaders, under the umbrella of the powerful lobby, the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), sought to bring calm to the initial quasi-apocalyptic anxiety that seized segments of the society.

“It was like trauma for everybody, because there was very little information on this virus and the possible implications, and then the word from the World Health Organization was that it was highly contagious and could be mortal,” Keith Duncan, president of the PSOJ, recalled in a recent interview with The Gleaner.

“The world was grappling with how to contend with COVID, but from a private-sector perspective and from a Jamaican perspective, we knew that we had to find a way to keep the private sector at work, while protecting our workforce, while protecting the consumers of private-sector goods and services,” he added.

The PSOJ Business Recovery Task Force, recipient of the 2020 RJRGLEANER Honour Award for Business, was born amid great uncertainty and constantly changing global dynamics as new information about COVID-19 emerged.

Faced with an existential threat to many businesses and no support expected from international partners or multilaterals to cushion the external shock, the PSOJ turned to its members for a solution.

A small core group, including Lloyd Distant, Nevada Powe, and Diana Thorborne-Chen, as well as PSOJ analysts, caucused on forging workplace protocols that could effectively limit the spread of the virus, while keeping businesses humming and retaining as many jobs as possible.

Duncan said that the PSOJ was able to secure buy-in from its members by making a compelling case that a public-private partnership was key to surviving, and overcoming, COVID-19. Concerns about bottom lines and the feasibility of workforce realignment, said Duncan, gave way to considerations for the greater national interest.

The PSOJ president said that the business lobby prided itself on purposeful, solutions-oriented advocacy.

“So it’s not about getting up and calling out and making noise. It’s about constructive engagement to deliver action, to deliver solutions. That’s what we are about,” Duncan said.

Having cleared the first hurdle of developing protocols, the next order of business was to engage the Jamaica Bankers Association (JBA), as cash flow was disrupted in the beginning of the crisis.

Those talks, with consideration from the Bank of Jamaica, were crucial in achieving industrywide waivers and moratoria on loans to a vast array of businesses, ranging from large companies to small traders. Penalties were frozen on thousands of personal loans as well.

Those interventions and the provision of working capital kept many companies afloat, one of the few silver linings in a battered economy.

The upshot: breathing room for companies, especially in the hospitality sector.

“We did that also for the Jamaica Hotel Tourist Association (JHTA) because the tourism sector was the hardest hit. So we sat with the tourism interests and the JHTA and the JBA, and we mediated that meeting to make sure that everybody could understand what everybody was going through,” Duncan said.

Fast-forward a year and the tourism sector reclaimed 80 per cent of workers, according to Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett, a staggering recovery after haemorrhaging an estimated US$46 billion in fiscal year 2020-2021.

The unemployment rate has fallen from double digits, in 2020, to just under nine per cent now, with many of the 135,000 jobs regained.

That task force gave wings to a broader multi-stakeholder effort, partly through the influence of hotel tycoon Adam Stewart, businessman and attorney Howard Mitchell, and others.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness and Dr Nigel Clarke, the finance and public service minister, then spearheaded the COVID-19 Economic Recovery Task Force.

That task force was broken up into subcommittees, such as COVID-19 resilience, chaired by the Ministry of Health; tourism, by Bartlett; and manufacturing and agriculture, by Audley Shaw. Workplace protocols were developed for each sector, with Duncan chairing the Local Services Subcommittee, and Education Minister Fayval Williams leading the New Economy Recovery Task Force.

The PSOJ president said it was a lot of hard work, but well worth the sacrifice of time and effort for business and country.

“A wonderful document was created and this committee met for about two months and worked through deliverables for each and every committee in terms of what were the specific policy recommendations and short-term wins that were possible, coming out of this crisis, out of this pandemic, and what it meant for the economy,” Duncan said.

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