Pe­ter D Nep­tune

An ap­peal for the Gov­ern­ment to dou­ble the min­i­mum wage and of­fer new in­cen­tives to kick-start home con­struc­tion are be­ing seen as key poli­cies by the labour move­ment to boost em­ploy­ment and help turn­around the lo­cal econ­o­my. In re­sponse to Fi­nance Min­is­ter Karen Nunez-Tesheira's an­nounce­ment that the Na­tion­al Bud­get will be de­liv­ered in Par­lia­ment on Sep­tem­ber 7, Na­tion­al Trade Union Cen­tre (Natuc) pres­i­dent, Michael An­nisette, said the min­i­mum wage has been kept down at around $10 for too long. He said with ris­ing prices over the past few years, many of the work­ing class­es are find­ing it dif­fi­cult to make ends meet.

In an ex­clu­sive in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian, the trade union leader ad­mit­ted that a lot has been done to keep in­fla­tion down, but the prices of many ba­sic food items are still much high­er than they were just a year ago. He of­fered an olive branch to the Gov­ern­ment not­ing, how­ev­er, that they should open di­a­logue with labour and the oth­er so­cial part­ners to get their in­put in pol­i­cy de­vel­op­ment. For ex­am­ple, we are call­ing for an in­crease in the min­i­mum wage but not an across-the-board in­crease that has been im­ple­ment­ed by the Gov­ern­ment. This is cost­ly to busi­ness and has not been a bal­anced de­vel­op­men­tal pol­i­cy. It places un­due pres­sure on al­ter­na­tive pro­duc­tive sec­tors of the econ­o­my that can­not gen­er­ate the rev­enues and mar­gins that the tra­di­tion­al sec­tors can pro­duce.

Dif­fer­ent sec­tors will have a dif­fer­ent abil­i­ty to earn and pay wages, and you must recog­nise that dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sions bring dif­fer­ent skills to the ta­ble. More at­ten­tion should al­so be paid to those work­ers who have made the ef­fort to train and de­vel­op their skill set in their in­dus­try; even though they may be at the en­try lev­el, he added. "The min­i­mum wage should be in­creased to be­tween $15 to $20 de­pend­ing on the in­dus­try, and em­ploy­ers must be giv­en new in­cen­tives to hire, in­vest and com­pete, not on­ly lo­cal­ly but they must be giv­en the sup­port to take on new in­ter­na­tion­al mar­kets as well."

An­nisette said get­ting the con­struc­tion sec­tor go­ing again will be the key to stim­u­lat­ing the lo­cal econ­o­my, and an im­por­tant pro­vi­sion in the fis­cal pack­age must be a re­view of the salary ceil­ing from the cur­rent $8,000, to al­low per­sons earn­ing up to $15,000/month to ben­e­fit from the sub­sidised mort­gage in­ter­est rates. Kick-start­ing con­struc­tion will stim­u­late de­mand for lo­cal ma­te­ri­als, cre­ate em­ploy­ment and gen­er­ate de­mand par­tic­u­lar­ly at the lev­el of the low­er in­come earn­ers. He said this strat­e­gy–to­geth­er with a com­pre­hen­sive so­cial safe­ty net pro­gramme–will chan­nel much-need­ed re­lief and train­ing to the low­er in­come earn­ers, who need the help more and gen­er­al­ly spend more of their in­come with­in the lo­cal econ­o­my than any oth­er group.

An­nisette lament­ed that oth­er sim­ple leg­isla­tive amend­ments such as re­peal­ing Le­gal No­tice No 132, which gives for­eign work­ers the right to work with­out a per­mit for up to 28 days would im­me­di­ate­ly add more than 2,000 jobs in the mar­itime sec­tor. "The ap­proach of the labour move­ment is not to pull down the Gov­ern­ment, as they do have some sen­si­ble projects, but the ob­jec­tive is to gen­er­ate jobs and val­ue for the peo­ple of T&T in a sus­tain­able way. "We are not hap­py when we have work­ers who go to work for four hours and get a full eight hours pay/day. We con­sid­er this to be un­pro­duc­tive and the coun­try los­es out when this hap­pens. "The Gov­ern­ment needs to open the di­a­logue with us and get labour, the pri­vate sec­tor and oth­er so­cial par­ties in­volved in the process to en­sure that the ob­jec­tive of sus­tain­able growth, de­vel­op­ment and world-class com­pet­i­tive­ness is achieved."