Micro businesses the way forward, says Lyn
Published:Friday | January 14, 2011 | 12:00 AM
Gary Spaulding, Senior Gleaner Writer
One of the leading entrepreneurs in the fast-food industry envisions that Jamaica's way out of its economic malaise is by renewing its focus on job creation at the microeconomic levels.
"It is time that we wheel and come again," Thalia Lyn, chief executive officer of Island Grill, declared yesterday. "The reality is that the days of relying on government jobs are fading."
Lyn argued that Jamaica must focus on the pool from which it currently draws its workers for the labour force.
This pool, she notes, is diminishing with frightening rapidity.
"I am going to leave the macroeconomics to the captains of the industry and concentrate upon what I understand better, the micro," Lyn said.
"I would like to suggest that philanthropy might be one of the most relevant and immediately responsive solutions to create jobs … . Philanthropy underscores one of the basic rules of free enterprise."
She added: "More jobs means a better country, a larger pool of trained talent to fill vacancies, it means more customers, more industries and trading partners, it means that there is a future for Jamaica."
The businesswoman, who also serves as chairman of the National Commercial Bank Foundation, argued that Jamaica was drowning in a huge trillion-dollar government debt burden, while GDP - the most straightforward measure of its overall economic performance - has grown by less than one per cent per annum over the past 30 years.
The way togo
Lyn, a board member of the Mustard Seed Communities and the honorary consul general for the Kingdom of Thailand, who is steeped in the principles of philanthropy, suggested that training by this method is the way to go at the micro levels to enrich the labour pool.
Speaking at a luncheon of the Rotary Club of Kingston at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston, she recited a statement repeatedly made by Prime Minister Bruce Golding that the world is going through a kind of turbulence not seen in the last 50 years.
She contended that Government's ability to create jobs has been crippled by high crime and the shortage of an educated/skilled trained labour force. These encumbrances, as well as world conditions and a bureaucracy that strangles local investment, have forced Jamaicans to wait on promises of investments to come on stream and the delivery of the 50,000 jobs needed each year.