EDITORIAL

Globalization and the local labour market

Two occurrences in the week just past have brought into sharp focus the largely unregulated nature of the local job market and the impact thereon of a globalized world.

The first was the admission to the local Bar on October 11 of no fewer than sixty-one freshly minted attorneys-at-law to add to the already existing fifteen hundred or so in the island. Given the low esteem in which the legal profession is currently held here, this naturally caused many to wonder at the fiscal prudence of the use of scarce resources to produce such a number of lawyers, while garbage remains uncollected on the streets of Barbados, partly owing to a shortage of sanitation workers.

This, we consider to be a complex issue. We sincerely congratulate those sixty-one young men and women who took advantage of the opportunity to acquire training in a profession that might assure them of a comfortable future existence; but at the same time we recognise the need for there to be some educational policy that would ensure a supply of labour for the national good, rather than flirting with the dubious legality of using, as the Minister responsible has hinted, the labour of prisoners and that of other institutionalised individuals to solve the manpower problem in sanitation. Of course, this is not to aver that the lawyer serves no national purpose but, as the Chief Justice warned at admission, there may yet be a struggle to survive in such a crowded profession.

The second was a statutory advertisement by a prominent local sales concern, which stated that having advertised for a store manager and having received no suitable applications, they were now going to apply for a work permit in order to have the post filled by a foreign national. The advertisement also informed that written objections to that recourse might be made to the Chief Immigration Officer.

This relatively unremarkable piece of information served to raise the hackles of more than a few Barbadians who queried the veracity of company’s asserted inability to find a suitable local for the post.

It might also have served as a catalyst for the broadside launched by Senator Caswell Franklyn in last Wednesday’s meeting of that august chamber, although his charge of similar underhand conduct by local hotels was later refuted by the chairman of the Barbados Hotel and Tourism Association who claimed to be unaware of any high incidence of expatriate hotel managers, as Senator Franklyn had suggested.

Again, we consider this issue to be a complex one. It would be witless in a globalized world to mandate that Barbadians only should fill all local available jobs. Indeed, the presence of many Barbadian nationals in lofty occupational placements world-wide should give the lie to any such suggestion, if only on the basis of reciprocity. At the same time, however, it seems unfair that where there is an unemployed Barbadian eminently capable of performing a job, that he or she should be denied because of some irrelevant consideration such as the lack of mastery of some language that would rarely be used if at all in the transaction of business.

Further, in the absence of legislative anti-discrimination protection covering the hire or engagement of staff, it would not be in keeping with the rule of law to insist that the company should not refuse to hire any specific individual.

We see the problem as requiring first, the enactment of anti-discrimination protection legislation in the hire of employees and, second, if it does not already exist, a mandatory requirement that one or a cohort of locals be trained to fill similar vacancies should they arise in future.

Barbados Advocate

Mailing Address:
Advocate Publishers (2000) Inc
Fontabelle, St. Michael, Barbados

Phone: (246) 467-2000
Fax: (246) 434-2020 / (246) 434-1000