Orville Taylor | Poll possession or pole position?

After the Morant Bay War and the 1938 labour uprising, the formula for keeping the goodwill of the electorate is to firmly have the working poor behind the party seeking to achieve or maintain power. This is simple human resources management. Let workers believe that you are acting on their behalf, and also the public in general feel that you are not trying to take them for fools.

Some distended stomach Labourites, apparently carrying belly for me and equivalently a number of idiotic Comrades, feel that making predictive statements is the same as making prescriptive ones. Identifying trends or patterns doesn’t put bullseye on the messenger.

As stated consistently in this column and elsewhere, people act based on what they believe to be true or real and not necessarily what is. Therefore, even if a government is keeping the economy afloat, generating employment, and improving the numbers of Jamaicans getting state benefits, it makes little difference if it comes across as arrogant, lacking in transparency, and of course anti-worker.

Every single incumbent party, since universal adult suffrage, that has failed in the perception in these three key variables, invariably has lost the next general election.

Our recent RJRGLEANER-commissioned Don Anderson polls have demonstrated a steady and now obvious shift by the electorate, away from the ruling Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). True, there is a lot of voter apathy, with 44 per cent of eligible voters indicating that they either may not or definitely will not vote. Only 37 per cent indicate a willingness to.

However, based on the polls, adjusting for sampling error, if the general election were to be called now, the Opposition People’s National Party {PNP) would win, as almost 30 per cent of Jamaicans declared an intended vote for it, versus 26 per cent for the JLP. It is irrelevant that it might be a minority government because of low voter response. But a win is a win. Of course, the die is not cast and elections are won on the day. There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lips, and it depends on which party ‘shub out’ its voters during voting hours.

UNASSAILABLE

A four-per cent difference is not unassailable. Moreover, the 24 per cent uncommitted is still a scarily large category and some of this 21 per cent ‘will not vote’ group can still be swayed.

Over the last two decades, my warnings to the political parties have brought allegations of being aligned to their political opponents. In 2007, I told the PNP that its failure to come clean on the Trafigura matter and its onslaught on the press, coupled with the failure to address the arising virus of disguised contracts of service, especially regarding security workers, would cost it the election.

One might think that it was fallout from the Manatt/ Dudus affair which brought about the demise of the JLP in the 2011 election. Truth is, the electorate did eventually commend the guts of Prime Minister Bruce Golding in ultimately allowing the security forces to act during the Tivoli operations, and at least symbolically wrest control of the society from a powerful ‘gangster’.

Despite the passing of the amendment to the Labour Relations and Industrial Disputes Act (LRIDA), in 2010, which now allowed non-unionised workers to have access to the Industrial Disputes Tribunal (IDT), the critical omission was that it still excluded the rapidly growing crop of ‘contract workers’, the majority of security workers in the country.

I cannot plead innocence here, because then Labour Minister Pearnel Charles Sr consulted with me while in opposition, and gave me the commitment, that my 2002 study on contract work in Jamaica would be taken into consideration and he would have pushed the 2010 legislation. It is a big deal, which must be acknowledged by both Labourites and Comrades.

Yet, rather than buckling down and doing what JLP founder Alexander Bustamante did in winning three general elections, and Michael Manley did to also win three, the next steps for the Jamaican workers were not taken. Moreover, neophyte Prime Minister Andrew Holness seemed to demonstrate antagonism with the media. Jamaicans do not like governments who appear to block ordinary people from accessing information and truth. Remember, other surveys indicate that on the whole, 80 per cent of us do not trust politicians or government.

DRAGGED FEET

Over the past two years, despite an amazing job navigating the COVID-19 pandemic and post-disease period, a stable economy, better pay packages for the public sector, and though unheralded, the historic initiation of the tourism workers pension scheme, the government dragged its feet like a poor woman’s flip flop slippers, on a number of key labour issues.

However, the most damning misstep was the clumsy way in which it introduced the long-overdue salary increases for parliamentarians. Against the background of belt-tightening arguments for other public sector workers, the petulance, despite the High Court judgment that overtime shall be paid to the constabulary, and the apparent attempt to neuter the chairman of the police federation, the government lost many worker votes.

Add to that, the defiance of the highest parliamentarian, the former speaker of the house, in somehow not recognising that her actions were robbing her party of more votes, and the slipping of the support for the JLP is easily understandable.

Finally, it certainly hasn’t helped that the ‘gang of six’ whose identities are being protected, and there has been diatribe by some elected and even one public servant against the Integrity Commission. The sociological analysis, which points to correlates of ‘electile’ dysfunction, is impeccable. Assuming that he is not one of them, Holness might be well advised to jettison this half dozen, as it might be wiser to be in government with those being vexed with him, than in opposition together.

At this moment, there is no election loss or victory, but I am sure Holness and others remember exactly what I said at the 2019 Police Federation Conference.

History is a great teacher, but sociology reads the data very well.

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.