A few days ago, Labour Min­is­ter Leroy Bap­tiste start­ed spelling out the kind of changes the UNC gov­ern­ment is plan­ning to im­ple­ment re­gard­ing our em­ploy­ment and labour laws.

Some, at least from a head­line per­spec­tive, make to­tal sense, like his plans to re­vive the Na­tion­al Tri­par­tite Ad­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee, cre­at­ed to bring to­geth­er busi­ness, labour and gov­ern­ment lead­ers.

Oth­ers are great as­pi­ra­tional state­ments that need con­sid­er­ably more de­tails in terms of what they will mean in prac­tice and how they can be im­ple­ment­ed – af­ter all, no gov­ern­ment is like­ly to say it stands for in­jus­tice, poor pro­duc­tiv­i­ty or a con­tract­ing econ­o­my, al­though of­ten that is where things end up.

And some may raise a po­ten­tial red flag if not done prop­er­ly, like sug­ges­tions that the time is right for labour law re­forms (a very im­por­tant thing to do) in or­der to strength­en work­ers’ rights.

Again, no one should be against a ro­bust le­gal frame­work that pro­tects em­ploy­ees from abuse and ex­ploita­tion, but our labour mar­ket al­ready op­er­ates un­der very tight (and many al­so out­dat­ed) con­di­tions, with ex­treme­ly pre­scrip­tive leg­is­la­tion.

So, the ques­tion (and wor­ry) is–how much tighter can it get to the point it be­comes hard­er, not eas­i­er, for the econ­o­my to grow and gen­er­ate jobs, es­pe­cial­ly those the mar­ket al­ready needs and will need even more in the fu­ture?

Take flex­i­ble work­ing, for in­stance.

As things stand and with­out any fur­ther tight­en­ing of the rules–our labour laws make it pret­ty much im­pos­si­ble for em­ploy­ees to have flex­i­ble work­ing con­di­tions, in­clud­ing part-time-like con­tracts.

This flex­i­bil­i­ty, as long as it is not abused, is the kind of thing that at­tracts younger, en­ter­pris­ing, dig­i­tal-na­tive pro­fes­sion­als, es­pe­cial­ly those work­ing in the field of IT/tech.

As it hap­pens, Mr Bap­tiste’s min­istry, as well as ‘Labour’, al­so has ‘Small and Mi­cro En­ter­prise De­vel­op­ment’ in its name and brief.

Fail­ing to have the kind of busi­ness and le­gal cli­mate that tru­ly sup­ports an en­ter­pris­ing cul­ture is pret­ty much a guar­an­teed way to stymie en­ter­pris­es (mi­cro, small, medi­um or large) and then fall be­hind as the world moves on.

In our in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions mind­set, we are still more ob­sessed with leg­is­lat­ing over of­fi­cial­ly ap­proved roles (through the Recog­ni­tion Board) than ac­tu­al­ly al­low­ing busi­ness–pri­vate or state-owned–to move with the times and needs at the right speed.

And wait­ing for a board to ac­cept a new job role be­fore peo­ple can be hired and start work­ing is def­i­nite­ly not the way to go.

Speak­ing in the Up­per House last week, Mr Bap­tiste al­so high­light­ed the gov­ern­ment’s in­ten­tion to es­tab­lish a na­tion­al liv­ing wage and en­sure it keeps up with the cost of liv­ing.

En­sur­ing peo­ple are paid enough to live with a min­i­mum lev­el of dig­ni­ty is some­thing most sane peo­ple will ful­ly agree with.

The is­sue, again, is how to achieve that and not trig­ger the fa­mous­ly dan­ger­ous law of un­in­tend­ed con­se­quences.

Any gov­ern­ment, any­where, can jack up salaries through de­crees. That is the easy bit.

The hard bit is the con­se­quences that it can have for things like un­em­ploy­ment, as, per­haps per­verse­ly, the more ex­pen­sive labour be­comes, the more em­ploy­ers need to shrink the head­count to re­main com­pet­i­tive.

Or in­fla­tion, as hard­wiring wage in­creas­es to price ris­es, al­though well-mean­ing, can send in­fla­tion up, which, in turn, re­quires high­er wages and so on.

If in doubt about min­i­mum wage in­dex­ing and its per­ils, look at what it did in Latin Amer­i­ca, es­pe­cial­ly Brazil: the link­ing of pret­ty much every­thing to the in­fla­tion rate, in­clud­ing salaries and pen­sions, was one of the main rea­sons that led the coun­try to the high­ly de­struc­tive hy­per­in­fla­tion of the 1980s.

And the poor­est are al­ways more hard hit by in­fla­tion than any oth­er mem­bers of so­ci­ety.

All this takes us back to the be­gin­ning of this col­umn.

Like Mr Bap­tiste, most sen­si­ble peo­ple in Trinidad and To­ba­go be­lieve that the time is right for labour re­forms–and this is a clam­our com­ing from all sides.

But such re­form can­not be sole­ly based on the labour move­ment’s de­mands with­out mean­ing­ful and re­spect­ful en­gage­ment with so­ci­ety at large, in­clud­ing, of course, busi­ness lead­ers (from state and pri­vate en­ter­pris­es).

This will not on­ly en­sure the changes make sense and set a path to­wards sus­tain­able eco­nom­ic growth, with the kind of job cre­ation need­ed in the dig­i­tal world, but al­so cre­ate the con­di­tions for a set of re­forms that have the sup­port of as many as pos­si­ble, in­stead of just one side or an­oth­er.

If this Gov­ern­ment re­al­ly wants to make a mas­sive dif­fer­ence now and for gen­er­a­tions to come, it has a gold­en op­por­tu­ni­ty to bring key stake­hold­ers to­geth­er again through the NTAC and de­vel­op the prin­ci­ples and poli­cies the coun­try needs.

Even bet­ter if it can avoid the urge to turn every­thing in­to par­ty pol­i­tics–what if we even man­aged to get both the UNC and the PNM work­ing in a non-par­ti­san way to cre­ate an eco­nom­ic and em­ploy­ment frame­work de­signed to tran­scend the po­lit­i­cal mud­sling­ing so that we can have the right con­di­tions to en­sure com­pet­i­tive­ness in an in­creas­ing­ly un­cer­tain world?

That is a very, very tall ask. But, who knows? We should nev­er say nev­er.