Busi­ness­man Richard Farah ex­am­ines the is­sue of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in T&T.

"Hav­ing worked in man­u­fac­tur­ing for 47+ years, the present in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions laws are the great­est cause of in­dis­ci­pline and low pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in Trinidad. Once a work­er gets a job, he/she falls in line with the cul­ture, that means that once one is con­firmed, it's al­most im­pos­si­ble to get fired, so one does as lit­tle as pos­si­ble at one's work­place.

"Con­stant ab­sen­teeism is al­so part of this cul­ture. One has to have an ag­gres­sive well-man­aged Hu­man Re­source de­part­ment con­stant­ly writ­ing warn­ing let­ters, which for small and medi­um firms can be a fi­nan­cial bur­den.

"Why is it that the same work­er that is un­pro­duc­tive in Trinidad, once work­ing in the US is a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent per­son? My view is that the laws and cul­ture in that coun­try cre­ate a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent work eth­ic. Ba­si­cal­ly, be­hav­iour tol­er­at­ed in Trinidad will cause the em­ploy­ee to be fired in­stant­ly if prac­tised in the US.

"In my view there­fore, Trinidad needs, for a start, to re­form its in­dus­tri­al leg­is­la­tion (like what Em­manuel Macron is try­ing to do in France ) if it is to en­cour­age peo­ple to in­vest and ex­pand. There is a lot more that needs to be done, but that’s a first step.

"We need to re­mem­ber Lee Kuan Yew’s com­ments in 1975 de­scrib­ing the Caribbean (but prob­a­bly re­fer­ring to Trinidad) as hav­ing a car­ni­val men­tal­i­ty. We are very pro­duc­tive when it comes to par­ty­ing. In fact, the de­vel­op­ment of Sin­ga­pore from a poor back­wa­ter af­ter the sec­ond world war, to one of the most de­vel­oped na­tions in the world, is di­rect­ly a re­sult of his gov­ern­ment mod­el.

"Can we adopt his poli­cies here? I doubt it. Peo­ple are not pre­pared to sac­ri­fice and there are se­ri­ous cul­tur­al peo­ple dif­fer­ences that make it im­pos­si­ble.

"The IMF will help solve the prob­lem when it does in­ter­vene, but they are an arm of Wash­ing­ton and the G7 group with no re­al in­ter­est in an eq­ui­table de­vel­op­ment pol­i­cy.Two of my best friends from LSE (Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics and Po­lit­i­cal Sci­ence), both se­nior econ­o­mists, used to work there and in talk­ing with them over the years, I was able to form my opin­ions as to the true aims of that or­ga­ni­za­tion.

"Fi­nal­ly, the med­i­cine we need is like the old Buck­ley’s cough mix­ture ad—It tastes aw­ful… but it works."