No future without workers

Garnett Roper, Guest Columnist

On the face of it, there is no relationship between the Miami International Airport in Florida (MIA), USA, and the Monymusk sugar factory in Clarendon, Jamaica. And yet each in its own way is demonstrative of the unsustainability of future of economic expansion without growth in employment.

Both the Monymusk sugar factory and cane lands which were recently acquired by Chinese holdings in a divestment deal from the Government of Jamaica and the newly reconstructed MIA and Miami Intermodal Centre (MIC) opened in July 2012 at a cost of US$3b, representing significant investment which has resulted in a net decrease of employment.

"The MIC is Greater Miami's 'Grand Central Station'. Constructed and managed by the Florida Department of Transportation, it is the southern terminus of South Florida's three-county Tri-Rail commuter train service, hosts MIA Metrorail Station and MIA Mover, and consolidates all of the airport's rental-car activities. The MIC will also be a central transfer point to Amtrak, Greyhound, tour buses and taxicabs.

"Odebrecht, with joint-venture partner Parsons, constructed the elevated 1.27-mile MIA Mover Automated People Mover System, linking the MIC with MIA, at a cost of US$259 million. The free tram service commenced operations early last September. The MIA Mover alone has eliminated 1,400 rental-car shuttle trips to MIA every day, which reduced its carbon footprint by 157,000 tons of CO² and saved the equivalent of 42,500 acres of pine trees - a few of the features that allowed the project to achieve LEED Gold Certification by the US Green Building Council."

The refurbished and reconstructed MIA processes 22,000 persons per day and has a 72-man Federal Immigration Hall that is able to process 2000 persons per hour. The available concessionary facilities have increased from 126 shops in the preconstruction phase to 250 spaces available with the new-look MIA.

What all this means, beyond the spectacular architecture and marvellous engineering, is the loss of employment. Taxicab drivers and shuttle operators have been rendered redundant and near obsolete. The airport will still maintain the jobs of handlers, engineers, automotive specialists pilots on the tarmac side of the airport. However, on the customer-service sections, there is a dramatic reduction of employed labour. Flight check-in is machine assisted. In fact, one can enter the airport and get on the plane without even exchanging a word with a human agent.

Sole human agent

Recently, I made my way through the baggage claim area of the rent-a-car centre at the MIA. There was no shuttle, there was a nice assisted walk between the concourses and the centre in air-conditioned luxury to the monorail, and then to the rent-a-car centre. From the rent-a-car centre to the metro rail and a US$2 ticket to the Tri-Rail and one is upstate Florida at the total expenditure of US$7 (US$2 for the metro rail and US$5 for the Tri-Rail). However, the only human agent was the one manning the ticketing booth at the Tri-Rail.

So what industries will absorb the obsolete and redundant workforce that once provided services and customer care at the airport? More and more of the things that people do have been outsourced to machines and the new technologies that are capable of performing those services equally efficiently and more cost effectively.

Are we creating new industries that are post-people and post-workforce? This is not an idle question. The people studying sociology and management are being made to imbibe two theories that shape how societies develop. The first is called Taylorisation. This is called scientific management and named after its proponent Frederick Taylor. It "was a theory of management that analysed and synthesised workflows. Its main objective was improving economic efficiency, especially labour productivity. It was one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the engineering of processes and to management.

"These include analysis; synthesis; logic; rationality; empiricism; work ethic; efficiency and elimination of waste; standardisation of best practices; disdain for tradition preserved merely for its own sake or merely to protect the social status of particular workers with particular skill sets; the transformation of craft production into mass production; and knowledge transfer between workers and from workers into tools, processes, and documentation."

I am suggesting that the tail is now wagging the dog. Economic efficiency is being achieved at the expense of employment. If there are no workers, there will be no customers. Industries that work well have either the state or the people as their customers. The more the base of customer support narrows to the few, the elite, the shorter the future of that business.

The other theory is called the McDonaldisation of society. It is based on the homogeneity of McDonald's Restaurants. It extends to the other service providers that also strive for homogeneity. For example, if one went into a CVS or Walgreens Pharmacy in Florida and picked up a box of aspirin on a particular shelf, one could go to any CVS Pharmacy or Walgreens Pharmacy anywhere in America and find the precise product on the precise part of the store that one picked up the aspirin in the first store.

On the principle of McDonaldisation, there is a contagion effect, so what one has seen at the MIA and the MIC is likely to be homogenised in the society as a whole. It's just a matter of time.

Returning to sugar

Fast-forward to the plains of southern Clarendon, where lands are returning to sugar cultivation and where nowadays sugar cane is being harvested and transported to the sugar factories. The most self-evident thing one sees is that there are no workers, only machines, trucks, tractors and irrigation systems.

I am not speaking in the defence of the sugar industry as a source of employment. It has provided only subsistent wages in the past. I have long been a critic of the ways in which the sugar, plantation, estates and factories have marginalised Caribbean workers.

The trouble is now the people of southern Clarendon cannot even count on subsistent wages. Only truck drivers and men who operate irrigation systems and a few tractor drivers remain as the employed labour in an area which knew only sugar and was once a thriving economic centre. It is likely that sugar production will increase in southern Clarendon with a decrease in both employment and social development. There are no farms and no industries that are employing labour in this part of Jamaica.

The New Testament book of Revelation, the 18th chapter, discusses the fall of Babylon. It depicts the collapse of the Roman metropolitan centre which was then the locus imperium. It disguises it by appearing to speak about the ancient city of Babylon. In a telling paragraph, it betrays the reason for the collapse of Babylon that it says 'sank like a millstone to the bottom of the sea'. It puts a lament on the lips of merchants and traders who weep for the loss of markets and trading opportunity and in so doing, lists the products they traded in descending order of importance. They said:

"The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargo anymore - 12 cargos of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls; fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood, and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble; 13 cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and human beings sold as slaves.

In the view of the biblical writer, Babylon sank because people/workers became the least of its priorities. The future of the economy without the worker at its centre and without the improvement of people's quality of life as its ultimate goal is to hit rock bottom. However spectacular its physical infrastructure and its service efficiency, it will be like an empty lot if people are not the central beneficiary.

There is an urgent task to which we should devote the best minds: it is to create a future for employment of the workforce. Efficiency is not an end in itself.

Garnett Roper is president of the Jamaica Theological Seminary and chairman of the Jamaica Urban Transit Company. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and garnettroper@hotmail.com.

In this 2005 Gleaner photograph, workers employed to the Monymusk Estate in Clarendon remove overgrown weeds from a sugar cane field. Guest columnist Garnett Roper has bemoaned the rise of mechanisation to the significant wipeout of the labour force. - File