The uncertainty among thousands of laid-off Barbadian workers is palpable and a union official says there is great fear among them about what will happen when the 26 weeks of unemployment benefits end shortly.
General Secretary of the Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU) and Independent Senator Toni Moore told a Central Bank of Barbados Regional Economic Forum on Tuesday night that the situation with mass dislocation on the island from the COVID-19 pandemic was very worrying as business activity had slowed significantly over the past six months and prospects for re-employment looked slim.
As the panel of experts examined the future of work in a post-COVID environment in the Caribbean, Moore said: “The natural question is what happens after this 26 weeks? There is a provision that you can trigger severance payment, but even if a worker triggers severance payment and receives that payment as a lump sum, then the bigger question is what next when there is no alternative employment available?”
However, head of the Caribbean Employers’ Confederation (CEC) Jamaican businessman Wayne Chen said Barbadian workers and employers will have to make some sacrifices. He said the tripartite arrangement between Government, workers and private enterprise will be forced to work on collective solutions.
“Barbados has had the longest standing formal social contract of any Caribbean country and it yielded very positive results for Barbados for a very long time,” he said. “In the last four rounds, I think . . . perhaps . . . the players have been too polite with each other and the crisis was not addressed as quickly as it should and it was a crisis of uncompetitiveness.”
According to Chen: “It is going to require a sort of social dialogue with some realistic sacrifices that everybody will have to make because we are going to have to pull each other out of this crisis.”
The BWU head pushed back on suggestions that it was workers who needed to adjust their attitudes to what the new world of work would require.
“When we speak about changes in mindset often times it is a view that it is the worker that must change his or her mindset to the type of work that will be available to him or her . . . but we also need a shift in mindset in terms of how we view decency in the workplace.
“Even in this COVID-19 period, we have experienced a hastening of some employers to posit a view that there should be some kind of force majeure because COVID-19 has not been occasioned by them. That is true. But it has not been occasioned by the workers either. So the question is how do we try to balance sustainability with ensuring that everybody, including workers, can also have rights in the workplace,” Moore told the session.
Responding to Moore’s comments, Chen said the tripartite arrangement had worked for the island in the past and it will have to be the source for solutions on this occasion.
“We are happy to know that Barbados is again leading in many ways in terms of innovation and in terms of thinking. I hear Senator Moore loud and clear. The fact is, the crisis we have is unprecedented and no one sector is going to bring us out. It is going to require a tripartite approach which the Senator is very familiar with.”
(IMC1)
