PRODUCTIVITY CALL

James Lambert, First Deputy President General of NUGFW, may have sounded more as an employer than a trade union leader when he made an appeal on Thursday to the nation’s daily paid workers to be more productive.  Nonetheless the call for greater productivity, coming as it did from a senior official of a trade union which represents a majority of Government daily paid workers, is of critical import. Lambert, speaking at the signing of an agreement for the filling of vacancies at the Couva/Tabaquite/Talparo Regional Corporation, cautioned that it was no longer acceptable for daily paid workers to work for one hour a day, while being paid for eight. In the process he  voiced the growing concern of corporate and other citizens who see the deepening mindless trend as an unnecessary cost to and burden on taxpayers. The productivity lapse had its genesis in the Special Works Programme introduced by Government in the 1960s to assist the rising numbers of unemployed in Trinidad and Tobago through the provision of temporary jobs, which allowed them employment for ten days at a time on an on and off basis. Many of them abused the system, working either one hour a day or not turning up on the job for several days, yet demanding, sometimes with threats, payment for the full ten-day period.

Later, the culture of lack of productivity would spread to regularly employed Government daily paid workers and become virtually endemic. It is this problem, still very much in existence today, which Mr Lambert has pointed to, and correctly, as being no longer acceptable. Unfortunately, the ‘lack of productivity mentality’ has over the years made a quantum leap to the private sector, and although it is not as grim as what obtains in the public sector, has nonetheless had a negative impact in all too many areas of private enterprise. Lambert, by stressing the need for a higher level of productivity among all daily paid workers, clearly private sector as well, has recognised that if this was not achieved it can affect the ability of the country’s goods and services to be competitive in the international market place. Indeed, what has assisted us, however artificially, to be competitive has been Trinidad and Tobago’s rate of exchange — TT$6.29 to the United States dollar. Admittedly, a not to be lightly dismissed contributory factor has been the country’s largely bankable work force. But this has been counter balanced in our thrust to develop an expanding foothold in the United States market beyond crude oil and energy based industry exports by not only that of the high level of technology in the US, but the productivity of the average American worker.

The Americans, however, in a thinly veiled attempt to reduce the country’s level of non energy and non energy based imports have recently introduced restrictive terms and conditions on imports of manufactures, insisting that these regulations were required as part of their war on terror. They have interestingly enough followed on a wide range of restrictions imposed on the imports of agricultural produce, introduced two years ago, during the escalation of the downturn in the US economy, which followed on the September 11 attacks. But the US economy was already in a state of decline. September 11 did not cause it but rather hastened it. And the restrictions, first on agricultural imports and now manufactures, have clearly been born of a felt need by United States authorities to defend the American economy. In this context, NUGFW Deputy President General James Lambert’s insistence that there was a need for a higher level of productivity and a distancing by all daily paid workers from the culture of shirking becomes relevant.  For us to heighten our competitiveness, indeed even to seek to remain competitive with specific reference to our now embattled place in the US market, our principal market, we must increase our productivity, US restrictions notwithstanding. Another factor in the market equation is that with the around the corner full imposition of World Trade Organisation rules and regulations, and with them the imposed abandoning of tariff walls, even locally produced goods will be under serious, even unfair challenge from imports, in their own backyard!