... Social dialogue key to success of partnership programmes
THE 1996 National Industrial Policy never achieved the macroeconomic stabilisation results that were to be the foundation on which the entire policy rested. The efforts to establish a national social partnership faltered. The Central Bank moved aggressively to pursue a policy of controlling money-supply growth but without the benefit of the fiscal policy support that was anticipated, programmed, and desperately required. The net result was that interest rates continued to be very high. These high interest rates played a role in the financial-sector crisis that Jamaica experienced in the late 1990s.
The lesson that Jamaica learnt from this failed process of macroeconomic stabilisation was that a much greater level of social dialogue was needed to gain support for a programme of social partnership and macroeconomic stabilisation in a country like Jamaica that had extreme levels of distrust among sectors and high levels of economic inequality, which levels had been worsened by years of macroeconomic instability.
The years that followed saw numerous efforts to engender social dialogue among economic actors. In 1997, Ward Mills began a movement called ACORN, in which leaders of the country’s labour unions, private sector, and academia have met together continuously over the last twenty-one years, focusing on building social capital and trust among actors in key sectors of the Jamaican society in pursuit of national growth and competitiveness.
Formal structures were established to allow for ongoing dialogue between the Government and the trade-union movement. The trade-union movement consolidated the majority of the country’s trade
unions under the Joint Confederation of Trade Unions (JCTU), which focused its efforts not only on short-term approaches to enhancing worker compensation, but also on longer-term projects associated with improving the competitiveness of enterprises and the entire country. Omar Davies and Dwight Nelson negotiated several memoranda of understanding between the Government and unions representing public-sector workers, that focused not only on issues of compensation, but also worker training and other initiatives geared towards workplace transformation.
The efforts to establish a social partnership continued. By early 2000, these became institutionalised in an initiative driven by the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), under the leadership of Beverly Lopez, which involved the first investigation into how Jamaica could relieve its debt burden through a debt exchange conducted in a manner that would not lead to a decapitalisation of the country’s financial institutions or a closure of the country’s access to international capital markets. Key initiators of this debt exchange investigation were Damien King and Peter Melhado.
In 2009, Prime Minister Bruce Golding agreed, for the first time in Jamaica’s history, to have prime ministerial oversight of a national partnership council. He went on to preside over the signing of a Partnership Code of Conduct in 2011. Prime Ministers Portia Simpson Miller and Andrew Holness continued this oversight function and signed, on behalf of the Government of Jamaica, Jamaica’s first and second national social partnership agreements in 2013 and 2016, respectively, along with representatives of the JCTU, the PSOJ and civil society. Both the 2013 and 2016 agreements place emphasis on prudent fiscal management of the affairs of the country and incorporate debt reduction targets. The opposition has played an observing and participatory role in Jamaica’s national partnership council from its inception in 2009 to the present.