The COVID-19 pandemic made clear to us in Barbados that workers, whom we overlooked and regarded as not terribly important in the grand scheme of things, proved to be among our most vital resource.
It dawned on many citizens who were driving their fancy cars and filling up their grocery carts, that the lowly gas station attendants or the supermarket cashiers or small farmers growing bananas and sweet potatoes, were key to the proper functioning of services that we take for granted.
The nursery attendants looking after our preschoolers, teachers in the classrooms preparing our children for their futures, and public service transportation drivers who helped to keep us connected, all played a significant role over the two years of this pandemic.
There was also a set of workers who suffered tremendously as a result of the fallout from COVID, not because their jobs were not of value. In fact, tourism workers are the ones who have helped to preserve this economy’s fragile golden egg for decades.
However, when the tourism sector collapsed and international air travel came to a halt, thousands of workers in tourism were left to struggle on the breadline.
Though conscious of the fact that the seasonal nature of the sector would always be a threat to their livelihoods, the sudden abandonment they faced was jolting.
We suspect that hotel and other related service providers were also shocked by the sudden and widespread implosion of global travel and tourism.
The injury of losing a job was one thing; the insult was the trauma and disrespect meted out to too many of our tourism workers.
Some were sent packing without vacation pay, severance, or even proper notice so they could prepare themselves.
Many of these workers felt letdown by trade unions and were forced to organise their own protests in the streets in an attempt to get what was rightfully due to them.
It was an unfortunate chapter that we would rather not retell.
Were it not for government’s intervention to extend National Insurance benefits and support through the Barbados Employment and Sustainable Transformation (BEST) programme to re-engage tourism workers, the damage would have been even greater.
So, we were not surprised at the announcement this week by top tourism officials that the sector was facing a labour shortage, just as tourism was experiencing a resurgence.
Remarkedly, it is also happening at a time when there is still a high level of unemployment, and especially among low-skilled workers, who traditionally fill many of the tourism-related vacancies.
We are not privy to any research into the matter and so we can only offer suppositions that the sector is facing a backlash of sorts for the way workers were treated when the pandemic first hit.
And while the sector was dormant last year, many of these workers took the opportunity to exit and seek other areas of employment including entrepreneurship.
Roseanne Myers, a former president of the Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association (BHTA) conceded how “unfortunate” it was that tourism workers had to confront their employers in public demonstrations in 2020.
In an interview last April, Myers told this publication: “There are some businesses that took quite different decisions. They stopped operating early, cut their losses, and closed. What that did was to leave many workers out in the cold, and I think it was unfortunate.
“I understand fully why some workers would be disappointed because you gave your heart and soul to something for many years and then a business owner takes a decision that was not necessarily founded on good business practice because they did not go after the help that was offered. And so, I understand the disillusionment.”
BHTA chief executive Rudy Grant last week lamented that some players in the industry are experiencing “challenges with labour”.
He conceded that it was “not surprising that in an environment that is still very fluid, and with the sector that has been impacted the most, that you are seeing persons looking at other opportunities”.
It is never a good thing to say “we told you so” but we warned in this editorial page that the sector would reap the fallout from the way tourism workers were treated.
The sector has an image problem that needs to be addressed. It has to prove itself to Barbadians that it is indeed a sector that values its most important resource – its workers.
