A pushy Clarke budget
YES! SOME elements of the presentation from the Minister of Finance Dr Nigel Clarke’s opening Budget presentation last week are similar to contents of the manifesto of the Peoples National Party (PNP). Others can be found elsewhere as well.
However, this is not the academy, inasmuch as members of that fraternity sometimes conspire to denigrate the work of their colleagues, steal, or obscure it with lies. Fact is, good policy, wherever it comes from, is good policy. With a tax rebate of $20,000 for the 570,000 Jamaicans earning less than $3million, a $200,000 increase in the income tax threshold, he might well be digging into the 71 per cent of nonchalant voters who spat on the last elections.
Exemptions for pensioners moving from $80,000 to $250,040 means another 2,000 of us geriatrics will be able to buy wintergreen. Add to that, a long overdue bolstering of social security via a US$20 million loan from the World Bank to implement unemployment insurance, and those of us, who have even personally appealed to ministers with solid research evidence, finally feel vindicated.
Clarke, as minister of finance, has to clearly identify how he is going to pay for all of the socially efficient provisions outlined in his four-hour long address to the Houses of Parliament and the Jamaican people. A J$11.4 billion hole is a big one to fill.
He has a major dissonance to resolve, with his removal of tariff on some agricultural imports, in compliance with the World Trade Organization, and protecting and engendering growth within the agriculture sector and the consumption of domestic produce. Hopefully, when Minister of Agriculture, Mining and Fisheries, Floyd Green, takes the mic and the stage, what looks like two conflicting approaches in what must be a unified policy of the Government will be explained and understood by the Jamaican farmers and population on the whole.
Nevertheless, since we are on the topic of whose idea this was originally, let me chest-beat while showing appreciation for the long-overdue move, which I have been advocating for more than 20 years.
RUBBISHING SUGGESTIONS
A few months ago, I took the bold and still unapologetic step of rubbishing suggestions by my colleague at The University of the West Indies, Mona, that we even cast a side eye at pensions. This is not armchair academics. It is based on both research and praxis. Social protection is an absolute if a country like Jamaica is going to have a stable economy, a committed workforce, and a society with high or sustained levels of labour productivity, and importantly, reduced levels of social violence and, in particular, homicide. When next I speak about these things publicly, hopefully, a large audience will understand the details of how the process works. Apart from that, such information is hidden in full view in books.
As far back as 2002, in looking at labour practices within CARICOM on behalf of the International Labour Organization (ILO), the recommendations to the Jamaican Government were for a redundancy fund similar to that which exists in Barbados and an unemployment fund administered somewhat like social security. Deaf ears! All trade unionists in the Houses of Representative and the Senate between then and now know exactly where I and my research stood.
These include, but are not limited to, my friends and former students, Granville Valentine from the National Workers Union (NWU) and Kavan Gayle from the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, my blood ‘bredren’ Lambert Brown from the UAWU, and my brother Danny Roberts, now with the Industrial Dispute Tribunal, and, in fact, everyone at the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions.
In fact, a very senior international academic, in a university ranked 18 in the world for sociology, a former president of the International Industrial Relations Association, was so engaged by the body of research and policy recommendations that along with another colleague from the UWI, I was invited to be part of the global discussion on the topic while Nero and others fiddled.
USE BY GOVERNMENT
True, work done independently for the ILO on flexitime was used by the Government, and it would be hypocritical if I did not acknowledge the quick response by Pearnel Charles Sr, who, along with Lloyd Goodleigh of blessed memory from the NWU, who de-escalated a 2002 confrontation between a senior advisor and me over an ill-advised suggestion that the Employment Termination and Redundancy Payment Act of 1974 should be discarded in its present form. Charles did eventually keep his promise with an amendment of the Labour Relations and Industrial Disputes Act in 2010.
It might be late, and I don’t know how the details of funding will appear, however, in the spirit of Michael Manley, who turned the PNP into a bona fide workers’ party, and Hugh Shearer, whose trade unionist DNA, must be central to the JLP, I have to applaud the initiatives
Finally, someone has listened. More than 30 years ago, Professor Errol Miller spoke of the social consequences of declining male enrolment in tertiary education. In a region that has the lowest level of university matriculation and qualification in the hemisphere, it was sheer stupidity for student loans to be both expensive and difficult to access. Given that the powerful sociological research shows an almost perfect inverse correlation between years of postsecondary education and likelihood of gang membership, murder and being murdered, this is a no-brainer.
At least twice, including in 2012, I presented this to the Students’ Loan Bureau. The public servants understood, but the policy makers didn’t get it. If we can use the removal of guarantors to increase male presence in colleges, we will help to reduce the violence rate. We cannot honestly make light of this.
Of course, as I said before, Clarke has to show how he is going to fully pay for all of this, and for the sake of the Jamaican people, he had better. Four hours of speech does not make him a master debater. Let us see how others fall into place.
Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.