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Akanni McDowall (third from right), President of the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW), joins hands in unity with members of the audience during the opening of the 74th Annual Conference of the NUPW at the union’s headquarters on Thursday night.

‘REFOCUS YOUR EFFORTS’

“THE reality is that the single greatest challenge facing Barbados is to return the economy to sustained growth by increasing levels of productivity.”

This was the word coming from Akanni McDowall, President of the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW), while speaking at the 74th Annual Conference of the NUPW at the union’s headquarters.

He contended, “I believe that the emerging economic recovery, in general, requires the various stakeholders in national development to relook at their strategic direction and seek to refocus their efforts to make a significant contribution to this renewed development… This emerging new economy as I see it, creates the need for robust representation, a high level of resilience and commitment that embraces a comprehensive set of approaches that the NUPW need to adopt to ensure sustainability for itself, its membership and of course the country at large. It requires you to rethink your strategies, roles and structures in an effort to respond to the competitive pressures and to negotiate new opportunities through collaborative efforts. You will have to go beyond the traditional representation activities to research new models of representation adapted to our context and based on continuous dialogue with your constituents and your wide varying experiences.”

“This Union must develop issues such as workplace diversity; that is the myriad of differences among people in the organisation. It manifests in race, gender, ethnic group, age, education and more. Then there is the improvement of performance of public workers in areas such as quality customer service, productivity, engagement, business facilitation and implementation. We live in a society that is starting to show a poor attitude to age, law and order, authority and gender. The rebuilding process places all the above issues at the centre of representation. It becomes then an island issue... The presence of the global economy has placed knowledge and learning at the forefront of development, but is this new? Barbados has placed free ‘lifelong learning’ at the centre of our development for over 50 years, so there are no excuses not to have been prepared. We had an early start on the knowledge revolution, but we seemed to have been slow in responding to new technological and managerial realities of the emerging environment,” McDowall indicated.

According to him, “The NUPW must be prepared to bring its ‘A’ game to the table and must measure its progress by the contribution the public sector will make toward a social and economic environment that is second to none... Let the value of the Union be measured by its ability not only to acquire quality information and develop strategies suited to every stage of our economic development, but the change it negotiates in our landscape. This requires you to develop capabilities to deal with constituents’ issues, challenges and opportunities, as valued persons… I see the NUPW contributing positively to national development, but from a new platform research, engagement and consultation. At the same time whatever you do, never compromise on your values, core mandate and institutional philosophy.” (NB)

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‘REFOCUS YOUR EFFORTS’ | Barbados Advocate

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