Ke­jan Haynes

Lead Ed­i­tor–News­gath­er­ing

ke­jan.haynes@guardian.co.tt

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert’s an­nounce­ment that T&T is at one of its low­est un­em­ploy­ment rates is be­ing met with scep­ti­cism from the Op­po­si­tion and some in the pub­lic.

Dur­ing the 2024 Bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion, Im­bert quot­ed the lat­est avail­able quar­ter­ly labour force and em­ploy­ment da­ta from the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice. Im­bert said the un­em­ploy­ment rate de­clined to 3.7 per cent be­tween April and Ju­ly. He com­pared this to the 4.9 per cent un­em­ploy­ment rate record­ed be­tween Jan­u­ary and March 2023.

“This rate is one of the low­est un­em­ploy­ment rates ever achieved in Trinidad and To­ba­go and au­gurs well for the fu­ture labour force,” Im­bert boast­ed. “Work­force par­tic­i­pa­tion ex­pand­ed to 609,800 per­sons in June 2023 with an ad­di­tion­al 14,600 per­sons em­ployed mov­ing up­wards of 595,200 per­sons in March 2023.”

He said labour force par­tic­i­pa­tion in­creased from 55.2 per cent to 56.2 per cent.

But in her re­sponse, Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said she did not be­lieve the num­bers.

“Find those peo­ple. Where are they? More peo­ple have lost their jobs,” Per­sad-Bisses­sar said. “We will ex­pose it as be­ing not true.”

There were al­so ex­pres­sions of doubt from so­cial me­dia users who were ask­ing for clar­i­fi­ca­tion on how the num­bers were de­rived, ask­ing if he meant per­ma­nent em­ploy­ment or con­sid­ered tem­po­rary em­ploy­ment like CEPEP (Com­mu­ni­ty-Based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme) or Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme work­ers.