Orville Taylor | Workers’ rights are black history

A century ago, today, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jamaica’s first national hero, woke up in Federal Prison, having served the first day of his sentence after being convicted of mail fraud. On this day in 1990, it was announced that Nelson Mandela was to be released on February 11.

Whatever the significant of these dates, what is unambiguous in the work and life of both Garvey and Mandela is the sanctity of workers’ rights as an integral part of human rights and nation-building. For the record, the trader unions were a large part of the anti-apartheid struggle. Thus, in countries such as ours, the race and class issue is often one and the same.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Labour Relations and Industrial Disputes Act (LRIDA) of 1975. Piloted as a bill, The Termination of Employment Bill, by the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) government in 1971, it and its companion which eventually became the Employment Termination and Redundancy Payment Act (ETRPA), are now staples of modern Jamaican industrial relations.

Not to be trifled with, they being introduced by one party and ultimately enacted by another represent a natural consensus, given the fact that both major political parties owe their genesis to the trade union movement.

When the trifecta is completed by the 1973 Holiday with Pay Order, we have a piece of ‘brawta’. To these three we can add the Employment (Equal Pay for Men and Women) Act. Ignored, because generally we tend to pay male and female workers the same salaries, especially if they are still in the same nominal category, it does have one major shortcoming.

True, recent data from the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) reveal that despite the linear academic and occupational advancement of women and their increase in numbers and percentage in the professional categories women are paid around 70 per cent of their male equivalents.

SIGNIFICANT GAP

While that may be considered discrimination, it actually points to a significant gap in the legislation, which does not address ‘work of equal value’; rather, it speaks of ‘equal work’. And while I totally repudiate the idea that an interior female household worker should be paid less than an external household worker, usually a gardener, sometimes it makes sense

There is no doubt, for example, that a female director III and the male director III are remunerated equally; female-dominated occupations are usually seen as less valuable. This is not completely baseless, nonetheless, because inasmuch as female household work is clearly more valuable than that of males, it might not be the same for other occupations. Thus, human resources (HR) managers may likely be remunerated lower than operations managers, for example. The HR officer might not be intrinsically less useful to the company. However, senior management may very well think so, until that they are made to face crises.

Still, if we are to be honest, often female-dominated occupations do not create the same level of demand in the mind for the purchaser of the services. Thus, WNBA players have no justification to be paid as their male counterparts, because they do not generate the same revenue.

This is not enough a minor point, because far too often, misguided gender advocates seek to draw equivalences where there are none, and find discrimination which only exists in the catacombs of their imagination. Nevertheless, one has to agree that the legislation needs to be tweaked to address work of equal value.

Another set of misguided persons, advocating radical amendment of the ETRPA, complaining that it is too restrictive and places too much of a burden on employers. Only those persons properly instructed by ignorance would form this view. The act has more holes than my primary school underwear and unscrupulous persons can exploit these to the detriment of the workers. None of these loopholes will be outlined in this or any other column.

REAL PROPERTY

Let it be understood, that the act recognises that an individual, having worked with diligence and fidelity for an extended period with an employer, has built up equity in his job, because it should be like real property. Behind and beyond this law, there is extremely good human science, which demonstrates that there is a very strong correlation between high levels of productivity on the one hand and the kind of security which comes with knowing that one has terminal benefits.

Another misconception which runs rampant through HR practices is the concept that workers and their trade unions can agree with an employer to lose certain rights on the Holiday With Pay Order or the principal act of 1947. Rather than pointing them to the relevant section of this legislation now, I should allow the labour lawyers, who advise companies, to seek and find the section and advise their client to modify their practices.

For good measure let me caution that however generous one might be to a worker; she cannot agree to be paid below the minimum wage, even if the value of the kindness is higher than her wages.

And now the LRIDA. Right alongside the Labour Relations Code, it provides a wonderful set of guidelines for disciplinary and grievance procedures.

Sometimes seen as an annoyance by impatient employers, these procedures actually protect them, especially when they catch employers imitating cats. With an Industrial Disputes Tribunal, that has the powers to reinstate unjustly dismissed workers and handle almost all disputes which affect rights of employers or workers, we have something that we should seriously protect.

Still, this is 2025 and it’s time for us to seek to improve what we have. Black history is labour history.

Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.