Barbados’ public health response to small spikes in COVID-19 cases is inadvertently promoting unemployment, poverty and social decay, while excluding key input from the voices that represent the country’s working masses.
This is the contention of the Congress of Trade Unions and Staff Associations of Barbados (CTUSAB), whose General Secretary Dennis DePeiza has slammed authorities for failing to present a plan that allows the country to function effectively while simultaneously managing the COVID-19 situation.
“The continued panic being fuelled as a consequence of small clusters of persons who have contracted Coronavirus is likely to create and drag the country once more into crisis mode,” DePeiza declared during a press conference on Tuesday.
“There can be no doubt that the authorities recognize the global trends, that the Coronavirus is not going anywhere soon, and it therefore raises questions as to what concrete plans are being contemplated so as to ensure the economy remains up and running with minimum disruption.
“It cannot be good for the economy that some sectors are not allowed to do business as usual and others operate on the pending threat of forced closures due to the need to constrain clusters which may arise from time to time. The country cannot exist in a state of fear and operate in a crisis mode for an indefinite period of time,” the General Secretary added.
On Sunday night, following a week of increasing cases and growing clusters, Minister of Health and Wellness Jeffrey Bostic announced a two-week 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew that went into effect on Tuesday. Employers have been warned to tighten their in-house COVID-19 protocols and employees have been asked, wherever possible, to return to working remotely.
In response to the measures, the Barbados Association of Medical Professionals (BAMP) complained that the curfew may very well be too short.
But the CTUSAB General Secretary, whose organization is the umbrella trade union body for the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW), the Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU), the Barbados Union of Teachers (BUT) and the Barbados Secondary Teachers’ Union (BSTU), argued that the number of deaths from COVID-19 are simply not commensurate with the level of panic being proliferated.
“The medical experts and others believe that each time you should come and run people into their homes, but you are running people out of work. Unemployment is high, businesses are closing and we are going to be in a position where our [economic] recovery will be affected, because this state is going to be a very lasting state if we continue with this very unstructured approach to managing the process, and that’s my position,” DePeiza contended.
“If you look in the obituaries of the newspapers every week, on average, you can see about 60 to 70 people have died and we’ve been dying one person in trickles from COVID. So where is the major alarm? Is it not the crisis we are creating with the NCDs, where people are not being treated and people are suffering because of fear of going to medical institutions? Are we addressing this thing holistically or in parts?” he asked.
CTUSAB also expressed concern about a lack of consultation, at the social partnership, about the measures to be implemented and their impact on rising poverty and social decay.
DePeiza explained: “We are in a situation where my understanding is that we get a phone call to tell us that ‘we are going to make an announcement now’. I mean, this is unacceptable. This is not inclusiveness. This is, to my mind, something out of the ordinary in terms of the behaviour that is being exhibited, and we would want to denounce it and ask that we be included, because that is what we said the social partnership is supposed to do.
“We don’t want people to die, we don’t want people to be sick, but we also don’t want to have a society that is going to fall through the bottom, because whatever happens, we have to manage the crisis.
“If you look carefully at what is happening on a daily basis in Barbados, everywhere you go, people are not productive. Long, winding lines are all over the place. When you go into offices, you cannot reach anybody. There is nobody there to serve you, so business is grinding to a halt again because of a lack of management of the whole process. I don’t have a problem if you are going to work from home, but if you are going to work from home to the detriment of productivity and to the detriment of the country doing business in the way that it is supposed to be, what sense does that make?” DePeiza asked. (kareemsmith@barbadostoday.bb)
