The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

PRIME Minister Philip Davis is to be commended for showing early in his tenure that the Memorandum of Understanding between his party and the trade union movement is a matter of substance and not just words.

In taking a conciliatory and indeed concessionary position with the Bahamas Hotel Managerial Union over wrongful dismissal claims of its members laid off at the Lucayan resort, government appears to be setting a welcome new standard of labour relations.

Workers in this country, from the clerical to the managerial level, have been sacrificed to an ideology that proposes a backward relationship between economic progress and worker benefits. The thinking is that, when the economy gets better, more benefits to workers will follow.

All of Bahamian economic history confirms the exact reverse to be true. The peculiar structure of The Bahamian economy means that increases in pay and benefits to workers in the frontline industry are the principal means by which the domestic economy benefits at all from the industry.

That is why every substantial rise in wages (such as followed the Burma Road Riot and the 1958 general strike) has led to a boom in the domestic economy. Yet each of these had to be forced on a reluctant political and business establishment.

The same holds true consistently in Caribbean economies, most of which are far less robust and resilient than ours. Rises in wages, forced or otherwise, lead to economic upturns, not vice versa.

While this move by the government is a relatively small gesture (affecting only 36 people) it is to be hoped that it is a signal that it will begin listening more to the labour movement over issues like a “livable wage”, which Obie Ferguson is rightly determined to keep at the top of the agenda.

It is always the right time to raise the minimum wage, as there is no evidence that it has ever been a negative factor in the performance of the tourist or any other foreign currency generating industry.

As for the complaints that this move by the government is unfair on the taxpayer, it is rather less so than the $100m-plus now spent on buying and up keeping the hotel just to lay off its workers.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

January 30, 2022.