Businesses in T&T are facing a crisis because of the shortage of available labour, Robert Trestrail, senior vice president of the T&T Chamber of Commerce revealed yesterday."At present businesses are facing what may be described as a crisis in their labour needs and finding themselves to be competing with the state work programmes for available labour. There have been renewed calls for individuals and organisations, including the Chamber, to accelerate the thrust to diversification. It is critical that these businesses outside of the energy sector be encouraged to grow," he said.
Trestrail was speaking at a breakfast meeting on Labour challenges and Its Effect on Business in T&T at the Chamber's Westmoorings headquarters.He cited statistics from the Central Bank which shows that in 2008 the labour force was 627,000 and out of this 29,000 people were employed in the Government's Unemployment Relief Programme (URP). By 2011, the workforce had contracted to 616,000 while the URP increased its employment to 38,000–an increase of 30 per cent.
"Today, with the growth of the Unemployment Relief Programmes, we can be assured that those statistics continue to evident an exchange of labour between the open market and the URP programmes. Tobago's tourism sector has been noticeably affected by the scarcity of labour. Most of the workforce is employed wholly or partially by the Tobago House of Assembly (THA) or state run programmes," he said.
Trestrail also gave information from research conducted by the T&T Chamber's Trade and Development Unit which shows other problems facing employers, including high turn over of staff, high absenteeism and indiscipline, disdain for the service industry, illiteracy and a lack of continuous skill training. He said this is partially responsible for the low rating of T&T on international indices.
"Poor work ethic in the national labour force has been consistently ranked in successive competitiveness reports as being among the top most problematic factors facing our country. In the last decade several state sponsored training programmes were introduced, yet it would seem that the graduates of these programmes are not entering the workforce. Research must be taken to find out the reasons for this," he said.He suggested one possible solution is immigrant labour.
"In T&T we are seeing evidence of this new wave from the Far East, Latin America and even our neighbouring Caribbean islands. Whether we see this as a problem or solution is up to us," he said.Charles Pashley, managing director of Prestige Holdings, local franchise operators of KFC fast food restaurants, called for a simplifying of rules to make it easier for immigrants to come to T&T to work.
"We need immigrant labour. We need to change the approach to bringing in licensed labour. We have to advertise the position first in the media, then we have to go through the Ministry of Labour. I think we have to spend $6,000 to apply for the worker to come," he said.