CRIME RATE BREAKING PRODUCTIVITY

The country’s uncomfortable crime rate involving murders, kidnappings, drug trafficking, armed robbery, car thefts and, recently, attacks on police officers will impact negatively on productivity in the work place, unless steps are taken to effectively halt the slide. And this, particularly, with respect to employees living in and around streets and districts in which drug-related and/or gang- related murders and other serious crimes are rampant, as well as those who work in companies whose owners or part owners have been kidnapped.

Persons, who along with their families live in East Port-of-Spain and environs, for example, Laventille, John John and Morvant, where crime and gang levels have tended to be high will have an understandable sense of unease at leaving their wives and children at home and may worry that something may happen to them in their absence. The ongoing concern will be translated into a lower output.  The situation can be worse if the individual who was murdered was a close friend or relative or even co-worker.

And because few employers are likely to be of the view that counselling may be necessary for employees who live and have families in streets where murders or attempted murders have taken place, whether or not in full view of the workers and their families, then the employees are left to cope as best as they can, resulting in reduced output. But the murders and attempted murders are not limited to low income housing areas, but have taken place in downtown Port-of- Spain, in some cases in full view of workers, while assorted acts of violence have taken place in and around City Gate, Port-of- Spain’s transport hub.

Meanwhile, in addition to the increasing belief that no one in the country is wholly safe, there is the reality that no one, worker or otherwise, regardless of the community in which he resides, is completely isolated from the ongoing assorted serious crimes. In turn, there is the vexing problem of workers having to cope, not merely with crimes in their neighbourhood or near to where they work, but those committed in the classroom or other areas of the school compound. In the medium and long term, a negative spin-off is that the lost productivity triggered may, with respect to factory-produced goods for export, affect the competitiveness of these goods in the regional and international market place.