THE RECENT STATEMENT attributed to Ralph Johnson led me to once again reflect on the kind of people we Barbadians are.
What exactly constitutes the essence of the Barbadian zeitgeist, our national character and spirit? Historians always warn about generalizing about national characteristics even though they themselves are very much given to doing exactly the same. Sometimes they build up grand theses of Rise and Fall based on assumptions of a cultural ethos. One critic notes that: “Sometimes the historical accounts are sketchy, satisfying neither as explanation of decline nor as evidence of the author’s thesis.”
Race is a persistent fault-line in Barbadian society. However, given the temperate and generally civil nature of a people, black and white who like to avoid certain socio-cultural anxieties, it is not a continuous or painful irritant. That is, until some intemperate statement renders it so. Ralph Johnson’s statement became an irritant because it came from a Euro-Barbadian of the employer class raising the historic antagonism between white capital and black labour in a society still haunted by its historical antecedents. As George Lamming has written, “we continue to labour under the antagonistic weight of the past.”
Race remains something of an irritant partly because of the white Barbadian insistence on socio-racial distancing. Exactly a week ago former Kadooment Band leader and designer, Marcia Chandler, herself a white Barbadian, noted that: “Like everything else in Barbados, the white people do not participate.”
Race also remains an irritant because the white minority is still perceived as controllers of the national economy even at a time when the exploitation of black labour is virtually nonexistent and a considerable segment of white society cannot be considered superfluously rich. There will always be those who will look back in anger, sometimes seeing the history through the prism of their own pathology.
Returning to Johnson’s statement; there are lazy people in every society but laziness and inefficiency are not in any sense part of the genetic make-up of Barbadian people, black or white. A country that has been recognized as “punching above its weight” cannot be genetically predisposed to laziness. The high ratings given by various international agencies like the UNDP, however they are calibrated, speak to some appreciable level of both endeavor and efficiency. Barbados was built on black labour which is why we should be wary of ceding our patrimony to others: “God forbid that I should give unto you the inheritance of my forefathers.”
Barbadians of my parents and grandparents’ generation were very hard-working people infused with a high Protestant, almost Calvinist, work ethic, generated through evangelical Protestant churches and the church schools. But culture, by which is meant, the prevailing values, attitudes and sensibilities, is not monolithic or static. It is dynamic, always subject to invasive external influences and the dynamics of internally mind altering forces.
The contemporary Barbadian, particularly the younger generation, has not got the work ethic their parents had. We may be reaching a point where bad work attitudes may be approaching critical mass. Whenever I visit Canada and return home I am amazed at the pathetic quality of service in Barbados. People who work behind the counters in Barbadian workplaces seem to delight in being rude and uncaring about the service they provide to customers.
Efficiency is a product of both management and labour and of the interplay between the two. A well run enterprise is one in which the “stakeholders” work together to enhance the interest of the enterprise. It has been suggested that low productivity is a result of “employee disengagement”. It must be a cause for concern that a 2011 NISE survey found that a mere 30 per cent of the Barbadian workforce felt “engaged”.
Employees must want to and be willing to engage. But surely, given the locus of authority, the onus must be on the superordinate employer class to engage with the subordinate employee class. Thus low engagement must reflect some measure of failure on the part of the employers. Efficiency is a product of knowledge and an understanding of how to apply that knowledge, but it is as much a product of values as it is of technical competence.
I keep recalling Professor Lloyd Best’s dictum that the problems of the post-colonial Caribbean are not so much technical as cultural. For example, the lack of “engagement” might well reflect the growing atomization of Barbadian society where there has been a weakening of civic ties due to an emphasis on individual material and group special self-interest.
On August 2003 George de Peana, then General Secretary of the Caribbean Congress of Labour, addressed a meeting of Labour Colleges and Tertiary Institutions in the region. He suggested that schools and universities in the region were failing to produce scholars. He concluded that throughout the Caribbean region today things were now done at a lower level of efficiency than they used to be and that trade unions also face the same predicament.
• Ralph Jemmott is a retired educator and social commentator; email rajemmott@caribsurf.com