I SIMPLY DON’T HAVE enough time to check into all of the weird things that go on in Barbados relating to our economic performance as a country.
But this issue of whether the Government owes backpay to the National Union of Public Workers’ (NUPW) members at the Grantley Adams International Airport (GAIA) has got to be one of the strangest deals I have ever heard about in union negotiations.
And I really love it when information that has been widely published and which is repeated every quarter in the Central Bank of Barbados Press releases is not used to settle the argument.
Instead, a Budget speech, described in THE NATION’S Thursday, February 4, edition as a “telling document”, is cited as containing the “evidence” required by the union to prove its case. (By the way, THE NATION’S description is appropriate because the reader of those speeches is always telling us about things he is going to do before not doing them.)
Let me background this a little. Last Monday, Minister of Tourism Richard Sealy made a few comments on the then looming NUPW action at the airport, in which he said the GAIA did not owe the workers the 3.5 per cent pay raise they are claiming since 2011, because it was agreed that it would only kick in if the economy improved between January and June 2011.
Betting against itself
So, in effect, here you have a Government entity betting against itself. Sealy put it more politely on Monday, saying simply the economy “did not improve” during the agreed period.
Ah, but the NUPW has dug into the long-lost ministers’ speeches and come up with the smoking gun. General secretary Roslyn Smith was reported in THE NATION as saying: “I provided the budgetary financial statements of 2011, which show that there [was] an improvement in the growth in Barbados of 2.1 per cent.”
Sealy’s statement was therefore “null and void” – a rather Draconian way to say “incorrect”, don’t you agree? Although I don’t have a copy of the 2011 Budget Speech to hand, there is a passage in it upon which Smith may be relying for the NUPW’s “evidence”
Delivering his second Budget Speech in the House of Assembly in August that year, Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler said that “so far for this year 2011, following the worst recession the world and this country has ever faced, our economy is growing at an average rate of 2.1 per cent and unemployment is now at ten per cent.”
Okay, case closed.
Q.E.D. and all that. Except…see that present tense in the phrase “our economy is growing”? Turns out it grew a lot less than the finance minister had envisaged.
Yes, unfortunately, despite the Rihanna concert and increased tourist arrivals from the United Kingdom, the United States and CARICOM during the first eight months of the year, the Central Bank had to change its earlier positive outlook in its third quarter report for 2011.
Just eight weeks after that example of Sincklerian verbosity, the bank reported in mid-October that real output in the first nine months of 2011 had only been half the rate projected at the start of the year (a familiar ditty which the bank seems to play quite a lot on its violin), and growth for the entire year was expected to be “not much better than one per cent”.
And if anybody at the NUPW would care to consider information which appears to be hiding in plain sight from their executive, just have a look at Table 1 on Page 8 of the most recent Central Bank Press release (December 2015).
It puts Barbados’ growth in 2011 at a dismal 0.8 per cent.
But growth is growth, so I guess the NUPW still wins the argument. Although, due to its “don’t care-ish” research, it doesn’t deserve to.
