Take warning!
THE DRAMATIC increase in the poverty rate by 5.2 percentage points in the Kingston Metropolitan Region (KMR) and by 4.1 percentage points across other towns in 2017 (the Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions) is a bombshell that has exploded the myth peddled over the last three years by the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) that it is taking the Jamaican people from “poverty to prosperity”.
Calculated on a base of 17.5 per cent, the percentage-point increases translate to a 30 per cent rise in the KMR and a more than 20 per cent spike across the other towns. Urban poverty, on this scale, is the clearest warning that the threat of anarchy looms even larger.
The sobering reality that stares us in the face is that an increasing number of
the 1.22 million Jamaicans categorised as employed are earning such low wages that they are now falling below the poverty line. ‘Hustling’ has replaced regular employment, with “the largest increase in the employed labour force between April 2017 and April 2018 [occurring] in elementary occupations … which include, among other jobs, car washers and street vendors”.
Those now being recruited as contract workers are hardly better off than those ‘hustling’ since contract employment denies them their hard-won rights, including maternity leave and a pension to support them in their old age. They are all on the road to poverty.
Life for the 122,000 unemployed is even more precarious, and dire poverty is creating a breeding ground for crime among the 325,000 young Jamaicans between 15 and 34 who are “neither working nor looking for work”, the majority of whom had four years of high school without certification in a single subject.
While the poor eke out a living at the margins of the society, rampant corruption at all levels of the JLP administration is the order of the day.