NO MAJOR JOB CUTS

Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley has given her strongest indication that there will be no large scale cuts to the public sector.

Speaking in Parliament yesterday, she described the retrenchment process employed by the former Democratic Labour Party where 3 000 civil servants were put on the breadline as a manoeuvre done by a “cutlass”, while any such job cutting by her government will be conducted with a “scalpel”.

She therefore knocked the advice of the former Central Bank Governor that 6 000 public workers need to be sent home, as the government seeks to correct the country’s economic difficulties.

“When the former governor of the Central Bank speaks now and wants to advise us, I ask him ‘where was he then’, but he has a different perspective on adjustment than I do on where the adjustment should be. For him, it is about putting labour on the front line and sending home 6 000 jobs. For me and for all of us who sit on these benches, and I suspect, even the Opposition Leader, it is about reviewing the purpose and structure of government and seeing how best we can deliver what government is supposed to deliver, while at the same time protecting the people as far as possible,” she
assured.

At the time, she was making a contribution to the Central Bank of Barbados (Amendment) Bill, 2018 debate in the Lower House, which reduces the ceiling of government’s overdraft of the Central Bank from 10 per cent to 7.5 per cent, “because we must live within our means”.

Earlier in her speech, the PM said that the country had been put through “an economic holocaust” by the previous administration, pointing out that in 2008, the Central bank held no holdings of government security; but ten years later, the Central Bank holds $2.2 billion in government debt including treasury bills, debentures and the overdraft.

Mottley noted that what was even more worrying was that the country had nothing to show for the amount of debt it had been placed in as there had been no large scale infrastructural projects conducted that could be responsible for the debt. (JMB)