Impact of COVID-19 on labour discussed

Just over 40 per cent of the over 30 000 people who were laid off in this country on account of the COVID-19 pandemic have returned to work.

That’s according to the Minister of Labour and Social Partnership Relations, Colin Jordan. He made the remarks during a panel discussion held yesterday by the International Labour Organisation’s Decent Work Team and Office for the Caribbean, entitled, ‘Creating a post-pandemic Future of Work in the Caribbean: Recommendations for achieving resilient labour markets’.

Minister Jordan said that the National Insurance Scheme was inundated with unemployment claims because of the pandemic. He said the volume of claims received had never been seen before or even envisaged. According to the Minister, they received claims from 32 000 persons, and some of them made multiple claims. He revealed that as of the middle of November, 13 000 of those persons have returned to work, which has resulted in a reduction of the claims being submitted to the department.

“We have had to make adjustments to our approaches from the get-go and where unemployment benefits were concerned, the claims for those benefits, what we instituted was a fast tracking of the claims processing and the settling of the claims... 32,000 claims in three or four months is huge for us and so we had to develop systems to allow for us to process and expedite the payment of those claims,” he stated.

His comments came as he spoke of how Barbados has handled the COVID-19 pandemic, telling those tuning into the panel discussion, that Barbados adopted a people-centred approach.

“A pandemic is by definition something that affects people and if we are going to get through it, then the approach has to be people-centred. So we adopted an outlook where we talked about lives and livelihoods and we dismissed quite early the view that existed around February, March, April maybe, that there was this dichotomy between employers and employees [and] lives and livelihoods; lives and livelihoods represented not two sides of the same coin, but the same coin,” he stated.

The Labour Minister went on to say that much of what Barbados has been able to achieve during this period was due to the Barbados Economic Recovery and Transformation (BERT) Programme. He contended that had Government not put that programme in place soon after it came to office in May 2018, the country would have been in a “much worse situation”. He maintained that the BERT programme allowed the country to have the fiscal space needed to manage “relatively adequately” in terms of the COVID response. (JRT)