The Tribune

By ANNELIA NIXON

Tribune Business Reporter

anixon@tribunemedia.net

The body responsible for addressing all labour-related matters in The Bahamas yesterday said it plans to form a committee to “operationalise a living (livable) wage in the Bahamas”.

Sharon Martin, the National Tripartite Council’s chairman, declined to name the committee’s members as she told Tribune Business that information would remain under wraps “until Cabinet releases that”. However, the Council and other labour specialists are planning to team up with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) for further studies on both the livable and minimum wages.

“Teaming up is something that’s always happening with the ILO,” Ms Martin said. “They are one of our key international strategic partners, and so we would have met with them in May of this year in Geneva and basically, again, to ensure that we are on par and on target to operationalise a living wage in The Bahamas or to see what we could do with the minimum wage again.

“We call it wage setting so that there’s just not one compartment of what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a tri-fold benefit of things. We’re talking about maybe looking at having different kinds of work hours. We’re talking about operationalising a living wage, and then we’re talking about looking at what increases to make the platform a better platform if we have to do another increase in minimum wage.

“So it’s good that we have the partners at the table together because we’re able to iron out each of these components to come to amicable decisions.” Other partners include The Bahamas Chamber of Commerce and Employers’ Confederation (BCCEC) and trade union movement.

“As you’re aware, the trade unions are part of our body, the Tripartite Council, and they are ardently working with the International Labour Organisation for several months so that there will be a perspective from their standpoint that they will be able to present to the Council,” Ms Martin said. “So work is ongoing from all of the social partners.

“The BCCEC, who are seated partners with us, would have also gone through their engagements with the International Labour Organisation and so has the Government side. Some persons are just basically on a fact-finding mission about what living wage is all about right now, and so we’re encouraging that part of it so that definitions and all that sort of stuff will be easy for persons to understand. We would all be kind of speaking the same language as it relates to living wages.”

University of The Bahamas (UoB) researchers, in a study produced in 2021, pegged Nassau’s monthly living wage at $2,625 while the equivalent for Grand Bahama was $3,550 per month.

The authors, Lesvie Archer, Olivia Saunders, Bridget Hogg, Vijaya Permual and Brittney Johnson, wrote: “Our gross living wage estimate for New Providence is 26 percent lower than the Grand Bahama living wage estimate, nearly 200 percent higher than the national minimum wage, 127 percent higher than 2013 poverty line and nearly 75 percent higher than the minimum wage hike proposed by a local union.

“Our living wage estimate for Grand Bahama is nearly 300 percent higher than the living wage, 200 percent higher than the 2013 poverty line and 140 percent higher than the minimum wage hike proposed by a local union.” The Bahamas’ private sector minimum wage, last increased following VAT’s introduction in 2015, is currently $210 a week.”

The minimum wage, though, is defined differently from the “livable wage” measure employed by the UoB study. It based its work on a model employed by Richard Anker, the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) living wage specialist, who defined a livable wage as one that can sustain a person’s “physical, emotional, social and cultural needs and that of their family beyond mere subsistence”.

Food and housing costs, based on a “nutritious diet” and “decent housing”, were factored into the calculations together with other daily living costs, while the research also drew on data from sources such as the 2019 Labour Market Information Newsletter; 2017 Labour Force Report; and 2016 Government of the Bahamas salary book.

Pia-Glover Rolle, minister of labour and the public service, yesterday told the same conclave that she is“looking forward to taking the White Paper to Cabinet for approval to continue consultation with the wider stakeholders across our nation, and then ultimately in 2025, to take our labour legislation, our approved new labour legislation, to Parliament.”

“This is to ensure that ambiguity is removed,” Ms Glover-Rolle said. “This is to ensure that we are capturing those grey areas. And this is to ensure that we are moving our antiquated laws into a more modern framework. That is what is captured in these 255 recommendations that we have received from the tripartite.

“Our consultation process involved the Government. It involved our trade unions, which are our employee confederations and our employer confederations, which are the business people, the organisations that employ these workers. So it was a very comprehensive consultation process where everybody had the time to dialogue, to justify their reasons for wanting the changes and to make it a very holistic exercise.”

Mrs Glover-Rolle also spoke to the proposed bi-monthly, or fortnightly pay, for public servants that was discussed in the Budget communication. She said: “The concept of bi-weekly pay would bring the public service in line with the private sector generally.

“The digitisation process of our human resource management systems in the Government is solely a key component is accountability, authentication, ensuring that the employees that we are saying that are workers of the Government and public service are indeed present and accounted for, which will bring some fiscal savings when we implement that accountability.

“But, most importantly, the concept of bi-weekly pay would bring the public service in line with the private sector. Generally, the public sector is the only employer or organisation in the country that’s still paying monthly. We also have categories of workers in the public service that are being paid bi-weekly,” the minister continued.

“So it’s an opportunity to bring our public service workers to a place where there was more liquidity for them because they would have a more readily available cash flow by being paid more frequently, and the ability for them, in that instance, to be able to manage their resources a little better.”