THE WAY FORWARD

Scores of former Caroni (1975) Limited employees, many of whose working years had been little more than the drudgery of sugar cane fields, were promised that with the closure of Caroni they would either be trained to be self-employed or to access jobs with better prospects than their old as a result of Government arranged and funded retraining programmes. However, while the principle of retraining former factory and plantation workers to gear them for the challenges of the 21st century work and market place is necessary, nonetheless the Food Preservation Course from which 224 of them graduated last weekend is hardly the vehicle needed to propel them forward.

And despite Minister in the Ministry of Finance Christine Sahadeo’s advice to the graduates that it was Government’s view that they “should be able to interface with technology and the tools of the country’s economic progress which are so evident among us” a Food Preservation Course could hardly be said to represent that thinking. Did Government conduct a survey to determine the level of education had by the former Caroni workers and the varying skills demanded by the job market and then seek to structure training programmes around both? Did Government, for example, consider an expansion of the training programmes offered by its own National Energy Skills Centre with a view to accommodating the severed workers?

Clearly, careful planning is required to train the former Caroni employees, or at least the majority of them, to enable them to make an optimum contribution to the growth of the society and indeed their own growth, whether as small businessmen/women or as individuals better prepared for the world of work outside of Caroni. And this is a more serious business than the public servant, who probably wrote Minister Sahadeo’s speech, appears to have understood. The phrasing, “so that they would be encouraged to empower themselves, to start afresh, and to rethink their lifestyles, values, attitudes and disposition towards work and the economy” merely played around with words.

When the late Dr Eric Williams, then Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, took the decision to acquire Caroni Limited from Tate and Lyle, the United Kingdom owners who had planned shutting it down, he understood that the closure was more than likely to have resulted in needless social dislocation. The World Trade Organisation (WTO), which pressured the European Union to have a rethink on the Convention of Lome and the Convention’s preferential entry quota system for ACP sugar, and incidentally bananas, was largely responsible for Government’s closing down of State owned Caroni.

Another factor is that the country’s final production cost of its raw sugar, because of the initial high cost of the cultivation of sugar cane, is in excess of the world sugar price and, therefore, uneconomic.
These factors meant that Caroni had to be closed down. Government, as part of the severance package, offered a training and retraining programme to the workers. But the way forward is for any such State programme to be so designed as to seek to meet both the needs of the country and the expectations of the workers. A Food Preparation Course is hardly the way.