Your turn, T&T unions

Through the glare of recent equally headline-worthy developments are the ongoing contentions by the country’s labour unions regarding proposed changes in NIS pension benefits from age 60 to 65.

The measure is being flagged by the NIB as an issue related to the very sustainability of the 50-year-old system.

The 10th Actuarial Review of the scheme was conducted by the International Labour Organization (ILO) which delivered an undeniably grim outlook that was long anticipated by experts in the field.

Competent analysis of this has already been forthcoming and the views and information are available for further insights. This is not the focus of today’s contribution from me.

But, believe me, from my own experience, all of this is unlikely to capture the urgent imaginations of young members of our labour force, even more so that the pandemic era has served to accelerate growth in the informal sector and in individual contract work.

The thing is, there is no haste by a majority of our workforce to pay attention to this.

For this reason, the efforts by labour unions to assure the multilateral nature of the conversation are extremely important.

Had it not been for the fact of collective bargaining, and a notion of formal worker representation, our workforce would have remained largely passive, outside of the efforts of trade unionists, and some employers, at this time.

The force of other arguments, on behalf of the workforce, is lost in the partisan battlefield in the form of apportioned blame, including from those who once ran the show.

The fact is, sounding an urgent alarm has never been found to be politically convenient – even when experts assigned to the NIB had waved huge, red banners.

It is the unions that are now called upon to lay rational challenges to the assertions of the ILO Review and to propose sensible alternatives.

Now, it is eminently understandable if you are not confident about this – given the movement’s recent pandemic credentials. But I believe they are indeed capable of outsourcing the expertise to contribute meaningfully.

They would need to realise that the work needed to dissect the issue requires an outlook that relies heavily on skills outside of the existing repertoire.

As a supporter of the movement and past member of one, the performance of many unions in the face of the pandemic was appalling and embarrassing, especially those that actively promoted COVID-denial and anti-vax agendas.

Meanwhile, the ILO’s May 5 Social Dialogue Report has stressed the importance of tripartite arrangements that reinforce enlightened dialogue and, even more, that the process of collective bargaining is an invaluable contributor to equitable outcomes.

The fact is, globally, the changing world of work – especially in the face of lockdowns and work-from-home arrangements almost everywhere – requires a much higher level of socially coherent aspirations and a willingness to change.

I have employed this space more than once in recent months to highlight the dramatic shortcomings of both our public and private sectors on this question. Modern digital facades exist to reinforce archaic processes and structures.

Both private entrepreneurs and public sector bosses appear resistant to and incapable of leading the required transitions. Much of the onus now needs to turn to the influence of workers’ representatives who understand the inevitable march of modernity.

The unions need to clinically assess the demands of telework, where they are relevant, and onsite work where digitally transformed processes are required as effective instruments to achieve greater efficiency and productivity.

How much time, however, has been spent by our unions on determining the degree to which there have been asymmetries in the ability of workers to interface remotely with their places of employment, customers, and suppliers?

It’s two years in. Have the unions been studying this? Have they surveyed rises and falls in productivity? Are union leaders believers in the inevitability of digital transformation?

One of the points made by the ILO Social Dialogue Report is that pandemic conditions have served to exacerbate unevenness across countries, communities and sectors.

Collective bargaining, the ILO insists, “has played a role in mitigating the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on employment and earnings, helping to cushion some of the effects on inequality while reinforcing the resilience of enterprises and labour markets.”

Put another way, more productive union activity not less, is required to take us to better days. Please, dear comrades, help us to have the required confidence in you to achieve such objectives. As it stands, too many of us have good reason to be sceptical.

Children and their rights

Hopefully when we’re through yet another episode of heightened public and political concern about the well-being of our children, T&T can buckle down and get really serious about the things that need to be done to make life better for this vulnerable group of humans. We have not been doing so!

The issue’s command of the news agenda will, as is customary, vigorously persist then wane until another dramatic development involving a child occurs. In the interim it will be back to official sloth, political convenience, and diminished attention by some who currently lead cacophonies of concern.

Though there is room for scrupulous criticism, what we are facing today is not all about the filing and forgetting of the 1997 Task Force Report (Ramesh Deosaran reminded everybody about it in the Senate in 2002, by the way) or the December 2021 report on child abuse at children’s homes.

It is not even about a lack of systemic all-of-government support for an under-resourced, legislatively strapped Children’s Authority which is just one element of a national child protection system involving a host of other agencies.

Getting to the bottom of all this would strike at the core of some deeply held beliefs and longstanding practices. Some inconvenient truths about how we run this place.

Among its manifestations is that there is no overwhelming preoccupation by the political class with any revolutionary change in official attitudes toward the protection of our children.

No matter what they try to say now, politicians past and present, have not done their best, however belated the expressions of regret. Have not prioritised. Have not clung to the basic principles of the rights of children. It’s not the only area in which we ritualistically drop the ball, but one of the most important ones.

Even so, it would not be fair to declare all politicians evil, cruel or indifferent to the cause. To do so would be to cast into the fire generations of them. They also do not land from other planets. They were born, grew up and live among us.

There is no doubt about general societal concern and care. Though there is the net negative impact of some social habits and beliefs (those associated with corporal punishment and religious coercion for example) by and large, we are not a population of callous, uncaring people when it comes to children.

I think the vast majority of private citizens would do virtually anything to secure the well-being of their children. Civil society elements have always been there to add support and to initiate projects of their own spanning a variety of needs such as health, education and learning, counselling and psychological support, recreation, and a host of other goods and services.

So, I don’t necessarily agree that we have ALL been complicit in this sorry state of affairs. However, there is the fact that children and their rights are not always expressed as a priority across a multiplicity of disciplines and concerns.

Some of us in the media have not been asleep on this. Between 2015 and 2016, a team of regional journalists collaborated with UNICEF, the CBU and the ACM in the publication of Our Children, Our Media – A Guide for Caribbean Practitioners which was superbly edited by Barbadian journalist, Julius Gittens.

This guide focuses extensively on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and its meaning for the practice of responsible journalism.

It was not an encounter of a first or second or third kind for journalists. And while it is true that there has been journalistic malpractice along the way there is now, by and large, greater awareness of special obligations.

In the preface of Our Children, though, a note from UNICEF claims that as many as 20% - 40% of children of the Eastern Caribbean are subjected to sexual abuse.

It continues: “After the slogans wear away from memory, the public service announcements stop running or the money for the next campaign moves on to another pressing priority, will a problem that touches at least one-fifth of the lives of those who watch, read and listen to our news reports and programmes simply go away?”

I add: What happens to this now that the flooding season has begun? I plan to post a reminder. People seem to forget very easily.

Caricom’s SOA dilemma

Next month, the United States will host the Ninth Summit of the Americas (SOA) in Los Angeles. Not all Caricom states are likely to be in attendance. In fact, I believe a minority can be expected to register an appearance ... unless something compelling unfolds.

Mexico and Brazil have announced a general lack of interest and Caribbean regional heads are mostly hedging their bets. There is, as well, a political crisis in St Kitts and Nevis while other countries like Guyana say they are awaiting some kind of regional "consensus."

Developments surrounding this event provide evidence that Caribbean global affairs are best considered alongside a highly nuanced spectrum of interests, assets and needs and not as an immovable, linear narrative involving small, unimportant states.

Several Caricom states, including T&T, remain undecided about their participation in the SOA. Others are asking no questions. The reasons are numerous and multi-layered.

Among the contentions is the likely non-inclusion of Cuba, Nicaragua and Nicolás Maduro (as president of Venezuela) on the list of invitees.

Alongside Belize’s John Briceño, PM Rowley has called for a rethink of the issue at meetings with senior US officials.

Foreign and Caricom affairs minister, Dr Amery Browne is calling for “a summit which is inclusive rather than exclusionary.”

Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, and St Vincent and the Grenadines have publicly supported such a view, for marginally different reasons. Little has so far emerged from other Caricom members of ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) – Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts & Nevis, and Saint Lucia. But we can estimate their likely positions.

T&T and Belize are not members of this curious brainchild of the late Hugo Chávez. Neither are The Bahamas and Jamaica - though their positions on such matters have become increasingly predictable.

Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador to Washington, Ron Sanders is insisting that the SOA is “not a meeting of the United States government; it is a summit of all the heads of State of the Western Hemisphere.”

He has also suggested that if Cuba is not invited and Juan Guaidó is welcomed as “the president of Venezuela” there is every likelihood of a Caricom boycott. This is however not expected to be a joint action.

Indeed, Guaidó’s controversial recognition by some countries has proven to be a persistent sticking point in hemispheric and global circles, including within Caricom.

Cuba’s estrangement is longstanding but far more subject to Caricom consensus. The country however remains outside the OAS fold. Yes, Obama met with Raul Castro on the margins of the 2015 SOA in Panama and rapprochement appeared on track but that’s now dead.

Venezuela officially left the OAS in 2017. The Summit is not, technically, an exclusive OAS affair, but is managed by a unit within the organisation.

Nicaragua forcibly invaded the OAS office in Managua recently and dramatically withdrew its membership.

Meanwhile, when Caricom leaders met in Belize in March, there was, apparently, no collective “decision” on a boycott of the SOA should Cuba, Nicaragua and Maduro’s (as distinct from Guaidó’s) Venezuela not be invited.

The matter was likely discussed in caucus but, as was the case with the contentious Commonwealth SG candidacy, there was no “consensus” on the matter. Otherwise, it would have certainly been included in the March 3 Caricom communiqué.

T&T hosted the Fifth Summit in 2009. Cuba did not attend, but Nicaragua and Venezuela were here in all their glory.

The Summit featured the famous photo-op involving Obama and Chávez. They were witnessed smiling and shaking hands, Nicolás Maduro in the background grinning childishly. Not much more is remembered in the midst of a virtual fiasco.

Obama stayed on his own at the Trinidad Hilton. The local press missed his press conference. Ortega, earlier blockaded at the airport, delivered a lengthy, ungracious opening ceremony rant.

Bolivia’s Evo Morales spannered local security to kick some early morning ball at the Queen’s Park Savannah, and Chávez presented Obama with a copy of Eduardo Galeano's ‘Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.’

Chávez’s gesture, I suppose, was not unlike displaying an open tin of corned beef at a Hindu temple, at least among T&T sycophants who gleefully distributed soft copies of the Galeano diatribe.

More open sourness continued a week later in Caracas when ALBA member states Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica (!), Honduras, Nicaragua and Venezuela declared that the never formally approved “Draft” Declaration of the POS Summit had been “insufficient and unacceptable.”

The situation has since changed and become even more complex. Eleven of the Caricom heads who attended are no longer in office. PetroCaribe largesse has dried up. Nicaragua has descended into tyrannical chaos. Cubans are protesting openly on the streets. Democracy is being sternly challenged in the US.

Following an April 29 meeting between US VP Kamala Harris and Caricom leaders on energy matters, Harris promised to keep in touch “including at the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.” She is not likely to be holding her breath over this. Neither should we.

Violence, grief and evil

Some sobering realities strike you across the face when you’re standing in the hot sun outside the home of two elderly men you know, and their lifeless bodies are lying on the floor inside.

Grief is patterned in a manner that captures regret, anger, and guilt in a single indivisible package.

Spend enough time in the journalism business and you understand its vicarious impacts. Live long enough in a violent country and you know its direct consequences.

Just one day after some celebrated a claim of resurrection we were, first thing the morning after, confronting death.

It is the stuff of macabre design. A juxtaposing of sorrow and celebration followed by more grief. Mervyn would have heard the message at church on Sunday, save for news of a final cruel act in which he would become a key subject.

For certain, there is a theology to cover all of it. But it hardly proposes understanding beyond a claim of pervasive, amorphous "evil."

BC and I discussed this via text messages two days later. Could it be that such a condition resides somewhere in all our souls?

If so, the challenge calls on their excellence, but surpasses the mere competence of lawmakers, police, judge, and jury. There is, perhaps, the application of law and justice both as prevention and as cure.

For certain, our frequently quoted “criminologists” have more than lightly scanned the literature that finds blood on a multitude of different hands and circumstances. Yet, “crime” is polled as election and political concern, paraded as feedstock on the hustings, and displayed as trite partisan and even ethnic one-upmanship.

“Justice”, we may consider, is both condition and process. Something that applies as much to pre-condition as it does to outcome. Hence, “social justice” – not as slogan or fashionable rhetorical posture – but as lived reality to stem oncoming tides of “evil” and to attend to them when they appear.

So, the reporter turns to me as we stood outside the house of death. “What,” he asks sincerely, “do you think accounts for all of this?”

Two years ago, it would have been futile to turn to a confluence of science and politics. But, today, the answer flows like vaccine through a needle: “The first thing we need to do is to disaggregate the experience. Chop it into bits and pieces and examine each one for clues and answers.”

Murder comes in different forms and under different circumstances. So does justice, with policing somewhere in-between to mediate the application of law. So, where is there a straight answer to all of this?

For starters, police commissioners, ministers of national security, parliaments and the people who occupy seats there are almost irrelevant to some of the more urgent tasks at hand.

It is true that appalling crime detection rates, sluggish judicial action, and sloppy lawmaking have done their share of damage. But isn’t there something in all this that points to civic responsibility and the value of social institutions?

I told the reporter last week it could not be expected that a police officer be assigned to every one of us every hour of every day. There is no judge next door to mediate disputes. There is no law or constitution that physically prevents me from taking your property or from hating you.

I remember once exploring prospects for a version of “broken windows theory” that embraces an expanded role for the citizenry. What some old-stagers identify as the “village” dynamic that places the onus not for vigilante justice, but for social responsibility in the hands of our communities.

There are experts in this sort of thing whose voices we are not hearing. The usual suspects make the media rounds and that’s that. I don’t claim to have any answers, but I think I understand the questions.

Maybe there are muted admonitions in the churches, mosques and mandirs, at the universities, service organisations, and even within the political parties, from which there has been very little of any value on this point.

Whatever the case, violence abounds. These issues should not await hot mornings outside houses of death to occur to us. Recent years have also proven beyond all reasonable doubt that we are not going to vote, press release, shout, march, or social media our way out of this.

 

Digital pains and the young

Since I last explored the myth of private sector digital superiority over the legendary sloth of state agencies, there has been a running narrative from friends and colleagues who continue to point to notable omissions on my part.

There have been people who have called and messaged me essentially proposing that I had forgotten to mention this or that enterprise, agency, or service.

We can indeed spend a lot of time adding to an extensive list that conjoins government institutions with private enterprise when it comes to the general state of underdevelopment relative to the embrace of technological solutions to societal obstacles.

There is little in sight to suggest studied commitment by most to the required precision and efficiency of the modern era, despite occasional declarations of grand intent. It’s nowhere in the partisan political discourse and persists as PR imperative elsewhere. We can’t be serious!

The last time I mentioned, in passing, the prevalence of shiny, new operational facades hyperlinked to a backend of primordial confusion. I called out the banks, insurance companies, telecom operators, commercial enterprises, public utilities and state agencies, as all displaying disturbingly similar symptoms.

Today, I propose to address links between these undeniable shortcomings and two seemingly unrelated but entirely connected features of the current reality.

The first speaks to the deliberate marginalising of youth and the second considers prospects for improving the well-being of future generations in the face of numerous challenges, including those of global scope, such as the climate crisis.

We have limited control over most of the latter, except to adapt and to be more agile. But we have virtual full control over the former. In both instances, though, there cannot be hesitation over the embrace of what’s new.

Almost every enterprising, creative and productive young adult I have interacted with in recent years has attested to the fact that the processes intended to keep our country viable explicitly undervalue and disregard the young.

Had this not been the case, we would have more likely than not by now negotiated more than one significant developmental hurdle. There is no way the current crop of digital natives, once handed joint control, would have tolerated the utter backwardness of operational processes in the public space.

Of course, this is difficult to contemplate against the backdrop of a notion of a presumed “lost generation.” The deviance of some is cast as statement on the condition of all. On the contrary, when I look around me, I see young people ready and set to take the reins.

Instead, they are actively blocked by official and unofficial processes that openly discriminate against them. For starters, try as a 25-year-old to register a business and open a bank account.

Meanwhile, people of my generation with the required mortgages, utility bills and established mailing addresses have already displayed a general inability to effectively align knowledge and experience with digital opportunity.

The transition is viewed with the kind of suspicion and scepticism ignorance breeds. Yet, the attributes that accompany experience are required in the transition out of a dark past that hangs like a stubborn shadow over current realities.

Additionally, while there is absolutely no doubt that digital technology is an indispensable pillar of our developmental goals, it raises questions requiring brand new ways of looking at how our societies operate.

For example, while it is true innovation can both address efficiencies and create economic opportunities, there are trade-offs to be made against some potential costs.

The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to cite poignant examples, advises that while innovation is important as a tool in addressing the crisis, there can and will be the prospect of managing increased levels of e-waste, addressing the negative impacts on labour markets and attending to a widened digital divide.

These are matters that clearly call on a whole-of-society approach driven and inspired by young, inventive minds and tempered by the contemplation experience can bring.

But none of this will be possible if we constantly erect barriers against the forward march of the young. I am not among the old fogeys looking on at them in disapproval.

Employ a battalion of young people to fix the digital mess. Elect them to public office. Provide them with the means. Get the hell out of their way.

 

A multi-layered fiasco

People who maintain a scornful distance between themselves and the regional process too often appear publicly, and therefore embarrassingly, oblivious to some striking realities of the Caribbean survival project.

The current fiasco involving the belated, proposed nomination of Jamaica’s foreign minister Kamina Johnson-Smith as a candidate for the post of Secretary-General of the Commonwealth highlights this phenomenon through numerous, largely uninformed, public utterances.

That said, there are indeed procedural, political and perceptual (cognitive) layers of the fiasco that remain unexplored and casually dismissed at our collective peril, since they also represent systemic shortcomings.

There was, for instance, the issue of the “languaging” of the March 3 communiqué reflecting the proceedings of the March inter-sessional meeting in Belize.

There is an enormous difference between the contents of a public communiqué and the official report of proceedings. Some of us who keep tabs on the process have been inclined to press for more disclosure to ensure greater precision in the public framing of issues raised and agreements reached.

Had the latter been the case, it would have been known by everyone that when the subject of the candidacy came up there was neither unanimous agreement nor mention of Jamaica’s active interest in the matter.

Knowing more about what actually happened at the meeting, and what was not reflected in the single-sentence statement on the matter, would have better nuanced use of the word “overwhelming” and not “unanimous” support for Scotland.

The statement reads: “Heads of Government expressed their overwhelming support for the re-election of Baroness Patricia Scotland as Secretary-General of The Commonwealth.”

This linguistic sleight-of-hand is among what I see as a (failing) “procedural” feature of the fiasco.

Additionally, had people followed what happened in 2015, the last time Caricom was faced with such a decision, it would have been easy to understand what happened in Belize. This is the “political” layer.

In 2015, T&T was among a Caricom majority supportive of the candidacy of Antigua and Barbuda’s candidate, ambassador Ron Sanders. Dominica had nominated Scotland and maintains this position.

At that time, T&T and others expressed concern about the “Caribbean” bona fides of a candidate who had served in both the UK parliament and government – dual citizenship with Dominica notwithstanding. This appears to be T&T’s continued position.

Reduced to a single sentence in the communiqué, the most recent matter was not rigorously interrogated by anyone in the public space including the press … until Jamaica stated its intentions.

Since then, the “political” layer of the fiasco has sloshed about in a toxic swamp of insults, jingoistic grandstanding, and general ignorance about the role of the regional movement.

For instance, a rather harmless tweet of mine (@wgibbings) about the language of the communiqué generated a sleazily framed reference to the purported uselessness of Caricom.

This is the “perceptual” layer of the fiasco – the self-hating belief that nothing good has come from recognition that none of us, as mini states, has the means to enter the future alone, or the realistic possibility of latching onto a continental destiny of one kind or the other based on mutual respect.

These factors all overlap every time collective self-esteem is demanded, and the option of agreeing to disagree is before us. Think about decision-making at the OAS over Venezuela and the most recent UN vote on the suspension of Russia from the UN Human Rights Council.

The fact though is the vast majority of issues put before Caricom are routinely settled by consensus with relatively little fuss. These are impressive credentials. Look, contrastingly, at integration arrangements in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa.

Also not considered in the assertion of “uselessness” are the institutional arrangements that have emerged since 1973, including close to 30 regional structures to provide pooled support in a wide variety of areas.

In full view of this, when tacitly assigned the task of prospecting an exit strategy for Jamaica out of Caricom four years ago, former Jamaica PM Bruce Golding and his team actually proposed a strengthening of the means to achieve the goals of Caricom.

Since then, there have been numerous references to the status of The Bahamas with one foot decidedly out the door. There has also been gratuitous resort to the cherry-picking of both obligations and benefits.

Some influential folks in Guyana now openly express a desire to explore other options. Yet, last week, some of them boastfully hosted the president of the CCJ – an institution whose role brought peace and resolution to almost two years of tumult there.

There are many things that need fixing. But these are hardly “shambles” or evidence of things in terminal decay.

What 'new normal'?

And here I was, thinking that yet another column on the digital failures of the pandemic period would signify thematic overkill.

Represented in modern tech literature as “opportunity,” the digital conduct of public business has, in our instance, been expressed as perpetual challenge.

Then, Monday, on account of the silly “proof of address” requirement of a growing number of public and private sector services, I attempted to log on to a public utility website – WASA in this case – and found myself confronted by the online traffic jam that conspires to “time out” especially when there is urgency attached to the transaction.

Here's the message word-for-word - the phrase “technical error” designed, with the naïve in mind, to provide convenient cover. The rest is all jargonistic gobbledygook meant to mamaguy and deceive: “A technical error occurred: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to obtaining a connection from the pool. This may have occurred because all pooled connections were in use and max pool size was reached.”

“Sorry, we just not ready,” would have sufficed.

For certain, the cognitive dissonance occasioned by unfamiliarity with a life made easier through technology, is not peculiar to hapless state services. It is there in banking, insurance, commerce, telecoms, and other areas involving private capital, profits, and vainglorious claims to operational superiority over the others.

You get a letter in the mail requiring that you visit an office … with the letter you received at the address, to which it was mailed, in your hands. Then you are asked to produce both the letter and something to prove that this is indeed your mailing address.

It’s like that time (years ago) I had an editor who wanted articles emailed to him accompanied by a fax and a call to confirm that both email and fax had been sent. So, no, media have not been innocent through all this. Hence the struggle with appropriate business models in the sector.

Additionally, though we remain under conditions of a pandemic (whatever the COVID denialists claim), there are lessons of this period already destined for the undercarriage of any passing bus.

Remote work, digitally composed documentation, online forms, and a variety of other now-acceptable phenomena are (many of them) destined to evaporate as magically as their acceptance emerged at a time of urgency and crisis.

The “new normal” is set to become nothing more than “normal” with a URL – “normURL”?

Bosses yearn for faces at the office. No banking is complete without long steupsing lines. Everywhere, paper is craved to validate reality. Bills are best paid in person for fear of online transactions that “did not go through.”

Former public utilities minister Robert Le Hunte was recently quoted as juxtaposing the “digital face” alongside the manual back end of our banking sector. It’s no different in a wide variety of other instances, including at agencies that once resided under his ministerial purview.

Given this belated epiphany on his part, I can only imagine the pain and agony of a Cabinet without Le Hunte at this time. Had he stayed, would we have had our digital vaccination cards by now? Would the “proof of address” requirement have remained? If so, what would have been the rationale?

Meanwhile, I am still not going to allow anyone to forget that at approximately 2.20 p.m. on Thursday September 23, 2021 – in his capacity as minister in the Office of the Prime Minister - Stuart Young announced the possible arrival of “digital vaccination cards” in “four to six weeks.”

Two digital transformation ministers later, there is precious little - outside of a decade and a half old legacy bequeathed by former public administration minister Kennedy Swaratsingh – to signify a radical change in official mindset. The emotional software to accompany hardware acquisitions.

It’s just the old normal, hyperlinked from a shiny, new façade. Public servants know where, usually across the street, to send people to get “photocopies” of their documents and bank tellers still need to hold paper cheques in their hands.

I recently had cause to display my vaccination card for admission to a restaurant. I no longer need to do so. Thankfully. Mainly because the crapaud foot that names me on paper absolutely requires the backup of other ID equally primordial in nature and design.