Work permit process needs review

Just one week into the new year, the warm, fuzzy feelings of the Christmas season appear to have vanished.

Many Barbadians are griping about the discomforts that have followed them from 2023 into 2024 – from the bad state of the country’s roads to the woefully inadequate transportation system. The two top bugbears are the country’s public health care system, represented mainly in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH), and the high cost of living.

Financial resources are critical to resolving matters such as health care and transportation woes. However, some issues are more complex and throwing money at them is unlikely to produce a resolution.

One of those is the granting of work permits to non-residents. The process is an important and necessary one. A population of approximately 287 000 does not possess the capacity to provide all the human resources in all the areas of industry and development that the island requires.

Over the years, the process was utilised heavily by the tourism and hospitality sector; however, with a significantly scaled-up training apparatus through the Barbados Community College’s Hospitality Institute and the University of the West Indies, the demand for expatriate personnel has been significantly reduced.

In addition, the level of knowledge transfer coupled with international exposure and training have helped to fill the void.

Admittedly, following the pandemic and the departure of several workers from the hospitality sector for various reasons, the Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association (BHTA) has admitted to a high rate of staff turnover and challenges in finding good workers.

However, a practice that many citizens find quite insidious is companies and institutions seeking to import labour in areas where there is an abundance of local capacity.

Private schools have been seeking work permits for English and Physical Education teachers at the primary level, individuals are seeking work permits for nannies, applications have even been submitted for plumbers after “having not found any suitable candidates”.

Just days ago, there was widespread condemnation of a retail store advertisement seeking a work permit for an assistant store manager. We appreciate that unemployment levels have come down, but the inability to find an assistant store manager for what is really a supermarket operation offended Barbadians’ intelligence.

It is actions like these that cement the position in people’s minds that the work permit process is being abused and it is time for the Immigration Department and the Ministry of Labour to undertake a comprehensive review of the entire procedure.

Citizens need to be assured that they are not being disadvantaged in the recruitment process by employers who have already determined their choice of candidate for positions, long before the vacancy is advertised.

We welcome the public interventions from Minister of Home Affairs Wilfred Abrahams and Minister of Labour Colin Jordan that the granting of work permit requests is not automatic.

Mr Jordan, who has been a longstanding senior executive in the hospitality industry had this to say: “The idea of either blatantly trying to look outside of Barbados and the Caribbean to bring people in to do jobs that Barbadians can do, or the practice of concocting a job title and a job description that has at its roots an attempt to put the job in a place where a Barbadian can’t say they are qualified for it, those two things are very wrong and they are not to be tolerated.”

Abrahams assured: “The fact that you see an advertisement in the newspaper does not mean that it is a done deal. People see the advertisement and call, concerned. Quite often, the things that they are concerned about, we are concerned about as well and in the majority of the instances, the applications don’t get approved.”

These are critical positions from the two ministers, but if Barbadians are to have greater confidence in the process, more information is required. There is nothing wrong with indicating how many work permits have been requested in a given period, in which areas, and how many were approved or declined and for what reasons.