The warnings and urgings of two very senior economists, related to a reported 10,000 URP/CEPEP and forestry workers being on the “breadline,” need to be heeded. The layoffs can weaken consumer demand, drive informal hustling and deepen social fragility, they warn.
“Whenever you interfere with the incomes of low-income people, you are interfering with the lifeblood of the economy,” Professor Karl Theodore told Guardian Media. The point being made by the retired UWI economist is that “poor people don’t sit on money, they spend it on food, transport, books, small shops.” Professor Theodore’s argument is that low-income earners are compelled to spend to meet every day basic needs and it will be a “catastrophe for demand” if those workers are left without income.
“Some will enter the informal economy, you will see them on the highway selling nuts, water and wiping windscreen, others will drift into the underground, which we know is already large and violent,” warned another former UWI economist, Dr Ralph Henry, who did the major study on poverty in Trinidad and Tobago.
Articulating something of a conciliatory note, another economist, Dr Indera Sagewan, is hoping that financial disaster can be averted via the “stipend” promised by the Government. She said keeping such a promise can lessen the impact of the Government’s already started end to the social programmes.
Another economist, who was once a United National Congress-appointed senator before transferring allegiance to the People’s National Movement, Tarhaqa Obika, importantly brought into perspective the reality that the firing of workers from the social welfare programmes “cannot be separated from social equity and race.”
One suspicion raised is that the United National Congress-plus Government may be building towards restarting the welfare programmes based primarily in traditional UNC constituencies, as a means of rewarding those supporters who voted the party into office. That is far from being far-fetched, as it has been the practice over the decades that supporters of the party in power were likely to benefit most from social welfare spending.
In such instances, the claimed transformation of the programmes, in reality, amounted to feeding the needs and desires of the supporters of the ruling party with jobs. It is similar to political parties paying off those who funded their campaigns.
Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, her cabinet and whoever the economists and political thinkers are, should, therefore, consider deeply and plan systematically for the re-organisation of social welfare, the economic, social, political and ethnic implications of what they are about to do with the programmes.
The thousands of persons unemployed, those completely without the capacity for employment in their present state and those who have taken to violence and other means of creating havoc in the society, need alternatives not in the distant future, but to survive in the present.
The business and professional community, who depend heavily on the walk-in and walk-out purchasers of goods and services, will also be deeply affected if there are no alternatives in the immediate and short term. The Government, therefore, has to operationalise its campaign promises for the benefit of all in need.
