Government is attempting to right a wrong that disadvantage those working more than one job when it comes to social security benefits, says Minister of Transport and Works Kirk Humphrey.
“Here is the tragedy. For the average Barbadian who finds himself in a position like that, working four or five jobs, at the end of the day, oftentimes they get nothing. So the value or the quality that we hold dearest, hypocritically, is the one that is not rewarded.
“We have come here to say that we have to right a wrong and to be able to fix a system to allow people who find themselves in that position to be able to live.
“The system has been built around one employer, one job, full-time. That is primarily the system that we have and I say without fear of contradiction that that is no longer a modern reality,” the Member for St Michael South said.
He was making a contribution yesterday in the House of Assembly during debate on the Private Members’ Resolution: National Portable Benefits Framework brought by Toni Moore, Member of Parliament for St George North and general secretary of the Barbados Workers’ Union.
The resolution calls for a portable benefits framework through the National Insurance Security Service to ensure that social security follows the worker and “not the job”; the development and implementation of supporting administrative, technological and enforcement to ensure that the framework is effective, equitable and accessible and commits Barbados to affirming the benefits that constitute an act of nationbuilding and a people-centred investment in fairness, resilience and social stability that leaves no worker invisible or behind.
Humphrey said Barbadians must live up to its principles and if people hustled legally to feed their families, then the Government must make it so that they are rewarded for it.
Just as different pieces of legislations have been brought to deal with child rights and justice and to ensure that workers received a better deal, the time had come to change the framework that was no longer fit for purpose, the minister said.
“If the world has changed to the extent that our legislation is no longer relevant, then our systems must change with it as well. We have been loyal in many ways to the systems that have allowed us to do things, which is fair. A lot of the things that we value, that were assets that we held on to so dearly, that allowed the country to develop what we consider to be assets so many years ago, some no longer exist,” he stated.
According to Humphrey, there was once the notion that a job, especially in the civil service, was for life but the systems did not take into consideration a person who may be doing multiple jobs, such as a domestic working at different places.
He said the resolution was “one of the most urgent and important conversations for us to be able to have”.
“There are lots of Barbadians who work multiple jobs, some by choice and some by design. We have young people now who think so differently about the world, who think so differently about a job. People want to move.
“These systems have changed and sometimes we get so loyal to the system that we forget that the world is changing and then, of course, the people who benefit from the old order do not necessarily wish to see us make changes to the existing system,” Humphrey told the House. (AC)
