Orville Taylor | A penchant for touching pensions: U but not We

Less than 18 per cent of working Jamaicans have anything resembling a pension or retiring benefits. Moreover, an even smaller percentage of this group is able to maintain a livelihood, allowing them to purchase the ubiquitous medication, celebrated by my colleagues who frequent the Police Officers’ Club and Senior Common Room.

Our University of the West Indies (UWI), monikered the ‘intellectual ghetto’, because of foolishness too often publicly stated by PhDs like myself, is the largest single recipient of the Jamaican Government’s education budget.

It is bad enough that the Jamaican people have little choice over who runs it, have no mechanism to put its chief executive officer through any disciplinary procedure for breaching its own rules, and is outside the scrutiny of the Integrity Commission, unlike other academics and administrators from UTech or the teachers and community colleges. Simply put, we the Jamaicans pay the most to keep the entity running. Mona is the heartbeat of the University, and without it, the entire system, including the Centre and Open Campus, would crumble.

Thus, given the importance of this plantation, the Jamaican people must get bang for their buck. Too often, policymakers, sometimes politicians with myopic night vision, ignore powerful research. Many of us in the Faculty of Social Sciences, including the Mona School of Business and Management (MSBM), headed by the sensible and no-nonsense David McBean, baulk when influential people spew such content as would make organic fertilisers jealous. Believe me! Some of us at UWI Mona actually have sense and have written tons. If the power brokers read or listened, we would be so better off.

Indeed, documents such as the Planning Institute of Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions and the Human Development Reports, penned with a deep involvement of some of my colleagues from the Department of Sociology Psychology and Social Work, are phenomenal documents of which the University should feel immensely proud.

IGNORE

Unfortunately, there are occasions when politicians either through ignorance, or convenience, completely ignore the empirical data and make statements which suggest a hostile relationship with the truth or are simply saving brain matter for use in retirement.

As inexcusable as such acts of omission are by persons external to the University, it is reprehensible when our colleagues speak on platforms and make a mockery of research literally under their noses. For this reason, before he became principal, Dale Webber was always a resource when matters relating to the marine environment arose. Similarly, the ‘earthshaking’ expertise of geologist, Simon Mitchell, was regularly sought; because he knows a thing or two. One critical thing about Webber, he was honest and truthful and understood his limitation and his own expertise. If he was ignorant, he didn’t flaunt it; he sought knowledge from those whom the government’s money helps to pay each month. When UWI research says, “Nuff okra round deh!” Steam the fish with it.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) gave to us the concept of ‘decent work’. Its critical indicators include, “i) adequate earnings and productive work, ii) decent working time, iii) stability and security of work vis-a-vis freedom from arbitrary dismissal, iv) equal opportunity and treatment in employment, thus, freedom from victimisation and nepotism, v) freedom of association and right to collective bargaining, including consultation with trade unions and vi), social security.

McBean, whose MSBM is an exemplar of using academic research and practice to make economic sense, is well familiar with the work of Anne Crick, Noel Cowell, Neville Ying and I, as we collaborated on the university’s labour studies initiative, 20 years ago. The research is simple, yet imposing. Rather than thinking of ‘decent work’ as an ‘outcome’ of economic growth, productivity and thus, development; it is an ‘input’ and causal variable. Common sense, not doctorates, tells us that workers who are well treated and expect to be taken care of after their service will produce very well.

Two weeks ago, with a front seat at the Dialogue for Development series of the PIOJ, the audience, including former Director General Wesley Hughes, was reminded that in three presentations, between 2000 and 2002 on campus, the research demonstrated that in the absence of decent work, even with economic growth, improved education, reduction of unemployment and ‘progress’, homicidal violence would remain high and even increase. Touché.

It is not a boast; or smug mastery of debating skills. The biblical prophet, Lot, took no comfort in seeing the destruction of his defiant cities.

BYPASSED

Newly minted principal of the Mona campus, my former student, Densil Williams, either through sheer ignorance or design, bypassed his erstwhile MSBM mates, and totally floored them with his ill or unadvised comments, at the recent CARICOM, Directors of Social Security meeting in Montego Bay. He remarked, “Those of you who study these kinds of areas and look in the private sector, even State sector, etcetera, a significant cost driver on our P and L [profit and loss] on our balance sheet is really post-employment benefits, pension benefits.” Had he simply talked to any of the MSBM three, he would not have made those utterance. Let me state it categorically, none of us share his view and he certainly does not represent “those who study…”

Perhaps faced with a large recurrent expense of paying the legally binding pensions for persons who have earned it, he might be setting the tone for tampering with it, ‘in the interest of the University.’ He might wish to look at the initiative of the tourism sector, as it survived the COVID-19 pandemic, through inclusive dialogue and decent work. In fact, the 2020 Tourism Workers Pension Scheme (TWPS), something former Prime Minister Michael Manley and Hugh Shearer would applaud, is backed by solid research, including publications by former Deputy Principal Ian Boxill and yours truly from the early 2000s. The TWPS is antithetical to Williams’ diatribe.

Decent work is a sine qua non, because the alternative is a culture of workplace abuse, which filters into the rest of society. Any reduction in the ability of households to take care of themselves, including the elderly in our country, whose post-65 population has steadily been growing, puts immense pressure on the sub adult male, in particular. Ask anthropologist Herbert Gayle or social worker Claudette Crawford Brown, how critical social protection is.

Hopefully, the UWI unions are taking sleep and marking ‘debt,’ because pensions are nobody’s playground.

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.