Former Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler has suggested that work times be shifted in some industries to help employees better cope with extreme heat.
He made the recommendation on Tuesday night as he predicted that research would show that productivity has fallen while temperatures soar as high as 35 degrees Celsius.
“How many small businesses, how many businesses even, have an integrated plan for dealing with the heat where their workers are concerned and their systems are concerned?” Sinkcler queried.
“How many persons have sat down with the [labour] unions’ representatives and others to say ‘look, we need to shift the work week, we need to shift the work day. We start it at 8 o’clock, let us start it at 6 o’clock, or if you are in a factory where there is a lot of machinery and there is heat, can we start work at 5?’?
“Who has done this type of work? I suggest to you, humbly, that it is absolutely critical that we train our minds to these things because they are not esoteric subjects anymore written in some research paper with data and numbers and indices and so forth. It is a real-life experience for ordinary citizens,” he added.
The Alternate Executive Director for Canada, Ireland and the Caribbean at the World Bank has forecast that reports from recent reviews conducted by the International Labour Organisation and World Bank will show that “this heat is likely to cause a fall in productivity”.
“That is simply an expectation that we know is coming and we cannot afford to have a fall in productivity at this time. We are already starting from too far behind. We need to have these systems put in place that I suggest,” he said.
Sinckler was addressing the Small Business Association (SBA) 8th Leo Leacock Memorial Lecture at the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination at the University of the West Indies (UWI).
The topic of the lecture, which formed part of Small Business Week 2023, was The Role of Small Firms in the Development Agenda for Small Island Developing States.
So far, some companies, including construction firms, have indicated they have put measures in place to help their employees cope with the heat stress.
In a recent interview with Barbados TODAY, the Barbados Association of Medical Practitioners (BAMP) and the Barbados Private Sector Association (BPSA) agreed that coping mechanisms were needed.
Tannis had suggested the creation of a national plan to address how the island would operate in light of the soaring temperatures, adding that the BPSA was willing to have discussions with medical officials, civil society and the trade union movement on the issue.
“We will have to go sector by sector to see what is relevant to each,” she had said, noting that clothing requirements would also need to be assessed, as “a lot of the traditional dress and wear that we adorn ourselves with every day, quite frankly, is inherited from our colonial past which is dominated by European cold weather and is completely not applicable to life as we know it in the Caribbean”.
