Manning promises full employment

PRIME MINISTER Patrick Manning yesterday declared that Government was close to achieving full employment in Trinidad and Tobago and industrial peace was vital “to safeguard and nurture foreign investments and promote industrial development in our land.” Addressing the opening of a three-day industrial relations conference at the Cascadia Hotel in St Ann’s, the Prime Minister said Government was continuing “to develop infrastructure that would allow us to achieve full employment, that is to say, an unemployment rate of less than five percent in the shortest possible time.”

“May I remind you that is not far off. Our unemployment figures for the second quarter of last year stood at 7.7 percent. Unprecedented,” Manning added.Outlining the chronology of industrial development in TT from the 1930s to the present, Manning said TT’s industrial relations were “conceived in conflict and nurtured in struggle.” He said over time this struggle has changed into one which now pits “the local working class against local and foreign investors and employers, with the Government at times being caught in the crossfire or in the direct line of fire.” However, given the changing realities of the international environment, in which TT is constantly seeking to attract and encourage local and foreign investment to match capital with resource potential and development aspirations, Manning declared, “That has had its day and given the road we have travelled and what is to be achieved together, it is reasonable to assume and quite necessary to assert that we seek to move on and move forward in a new and more progressive dispensation, more beneficial to our needs and today’s agenda.”

He urged the assembled delegates to use the conference to find ways to “transcend this history and culture of conflict and struggle to develop collaborative modes to manage employment relations in TT.” Manning hailed the Industrial Court as “a pillar of industrial stability” in TT and said the country would have found itself in “chaos unimaginable” today if the court was absent from the industrial scene, became inoperable from the start or bowed out “under pressure from those who were oblivious to its importance. “I need not mention that since its inception, the Industrial Court has saved this country millions of dollars,” the Prime Minister added. He also stated that some of the court’s biggest detractors are its main advocates today.

Explaining that no development could take place in TT if the country could not guarantee local and foreign investors an environment of industrial peace, Manning said this was why the PNM enacted the Industrial Stabilisation Act in 1965 and the Industrial Relations Act of 1972. Given TT’s prominent role in the development of the Caricom Single Market and Economy and its bid for the Free Trade Area of the Americas Secretariat, the Prime Minister said mechanisms must be found “to unlocking our national and international competitiveness.” Manning said competitiveness “is not only about resource endowments or labour costs, but emerges additionally out of overall factors, such as the management of industrial relations.” The Prime Minister added that “the future prosperity and development of TT depends, to a large extent, on the effective and efficient conduct of our labour relations.”