The minister for small business chided the construction industry for retaining workers’ earnings as the unfair business practice of “modern-day robber barons”, even as he acknowledged that several businesses have driven many young people into entrepreneurship.
As he launched Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW), which is facilitated by the Barbados Youth Business Trust (BYBT), Minister of Small Business and Entrepreneurship Kerrie Symmonds acknowledged the sharp practice had resulted in a burst of new business enterprises during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While Symmonds praised the BYBT and entrepreneurs for impressive work during the pandemic’s last 20 months, he stressed that the rise in small business has been driven in large part by larger businesses meting out unfair treatment to employees.
He said: “We have to realize that they are some forces in this society which are increasingly driving people in the direction of entrepreneurship because the circumstances of traditional employment are no longer as hospitable and as commodious as they would have been in past years.
“Hundreds of Barbadians, perhaps as many as thousands of Barbadians, most particularly and most disturbingly for me, Barbadians whose economic background and location is in the working class of this country, those people are today put in a position where many of them are now being disadvantaged in their places of employment. They are being disadvantaged in circumstances where we are having to co-exist with what can only be described in some regards as being the modern-day equivalent of robber barons.”
The Minister of Small Business criticised several businesses for going to great lengths to avoid financial obligations to their workers during the pandemic, while at the same time mandating increased working hours without any significant pay increase.
Symmonds said: “We as a society have to pause and ask some difficult questions – how do labourers go to work, five days and six days a week in some instances? These folks report for duty where and when they are told to report. These folks take and execute instructions issued to them by a foreman, they agree to work for a salary that is set for them, and the hours that they work are determined for them… and yet these people are told that they are independent contractors and that statutory obligations like National Insurance and other responsibilities have nothing to do with the employer.”
He added that these questionable business practices have been seen in several of the island’s industries but zeroed in on the construction sector.
He said: “We now have it raising its ugly head in the construction sector, in particular, this concept of retention sums, which would be the sums that are withheld as a security to ensure that work which is done has been properly done, and after a period of time that retention sum would then be released to the contractor.
“But those retention sums are being withheld in terms of a percentage from the salary or the wage of the labourer. Now clearly in those circumstances, we have an evolution of a Barbados that we cannot be proud about, and it is a galling… unacceptable and unconscionable development that has no place in a 21st century Barbados.”
He noted that the rising start-up figures have proved to be a double-edged sword, with many entrepreneurs reporting poor experiences were the catalyst for leaving their jobs.
GEW is a large international campaign that introduces entrepreneurship and its best practices to young people. During the week of celebrations, the BYBT will host a number of virtual workshops on website design, branding and networking, and other meetings aimed at providing tips for prospective business owners. (SB)
