EDITORIAL: A different approach
It is understandable that the several local workers’ organizations, especially those of public workers, would be aggrieved at the current state of affairs.Having not had a wage increase for nearly a decade in a context of globally rising prices for life’s necessities, it has attempted to compensate for this deficiency by the collective proposal of a double digit percentage increase in remuneration. The fact that it has so far seemingly failed to convince the current administration that this is even a remote possibility added to the imposition of a 400 per cent increase in the National Social Responsibility Levy [NSRL] to which all are subject, would have scarcely conduced to their comfort.The recent protest march, although seemingly in vain, was thus a natural reaction.
Still, comparatively speaking, it would seem as if the local organizations are not that badly off after all.The Stuart administration has hinted rather broadly that part of the revenue from the NSRL will be used to fund any agreed wage increases, even as it tries to maintain intact an admittedly bloated public sector.
The circumstances might indeed have been completely different. France, a jurisdiction that is reputed to have the world’s sixth richest economy, but currently faced with a fiscal problem similar to ours has chosen to resolve the matter in a starkly different way. Viewing the issue as one that may be best redressed by a strengthening of the position of the private sector, the Macron government has sought to dilute much of the employment protection traditionally available to workers in what has beeb described as the jurisdiction that had “some of Europe’s strongest worker protection laws”.
According to one report in a French journal, the French are hoping to streamline the laws governing everything from worker safety to bonus entitlements, and to give the employers, unions and individual employees more freedom to negotiate the terms and conditions of employment.
There are now limits on compensation for wrongful dismissals, and while there has been proposed a minor increase in the assessment of severance payments, foreign multinational corporations will noe be able to effect multiple layoffs based on their economic performance in France solely and not on a global level.
Changes have also been effected in the area of fixed term contract employment whereby employers will be freely able to determine their length, the renewal off such contracts and the waiting period between them.
Naturally, reaction to these developments have been mixed among both labour and capital and along partisan lines with employers’ organizations finding them “pragmatic and an important step towards strengthening business confidence” and the pro-Macron factions applauding the measures, while the labour confederation, supported by the left wing political party, France Unbowed, has called for demonstrations against the measures.
This phenomenon demonstrates that the current problem is far more complex that may have been imagined initially. It transcends the intersection between the law, economic policy and industrial relations in the context of social ordering. In this connection, while the incumbent Barbados administration has chosen to maintain the industrial rights and the employment of workers even at an increase in the cost of living to individual citizens, the French government has elected rather to weaken the rights of its workers and thus to fortify the hands of capital.
In the local protest march mentioned above, there was a consensus of labour and some representatives of capital. Some then termed it an unholy alliance and remarked how politics made for strange bedfellows. It would have been of some interest to speculate on the outcome had government here chosen to adopt the French solution.