THE MINISTRY OF LABOUR has taken on a different role. Our role has traditionally been that of ensuring the conditions of the workplace and through our employment agency procuring work for our workers.
But now with our Human Resource Development Strategy we are also working to ensure that our workers are prepared for the workplace and that they have the right skills and that productivity can be realised through that training, ensuring that all our workers are trained not just to have a paper qualification but trained to be able to meet the demands of the workplace, something that we hear employers complain about.
They complain that they see workers come with a certificate and when they put them in the workplace that does not translate into anything meaningful. So we are working with our private sector to ensure that our training is not only certified but that it is relevant.
With the certification our workers now have more portabiblity that they can take that certification and they can go anywhere across the region and indeed we are working in other aspects of our ministry’s work to ensure that they can take that across the world.
We are working with Canada, we are working with Europe through the Economic Partnership Agreement to ensure that workers who are skilled and certified then take advantage of these opportunities.
One of the challenges that we have is the speed at which information is shared, so that if somebody is applying for something you have to do the research in order to give them approval, but it means going sometimes and looking through archaic systems and it takes forever for persons to be able to get the kind of approval that they want in order to do business.
And part of what we are doing with our knowledge management system is ensuring that information is collected properly, stored and classified properly and then retrieved in a timely manner.
And that should shave days off some of the work that we are talking about when we look at the challenges with doing business.
We are also working to improve our research for improving innovation and entrepreneurship as well.
Persons are no longer employed in the traditional areas of employment, but they can now take their innovative ideas, and we are working to be able to help them to ensure that they can take those ideas, develop them into businesses as well.
All in all we are ensuring that there is an enabling environment across Barbados that would allow persons to retool, to upgrade skills, to get more relevant skills.
Restructuring is not easy because the truth is how things happen in Barbados it’s etched in stone so restructuring means changing these ways of doing business that persons kind of hold on to.
But we are chipping away at that stone and we are making progress. We look forward to changing the way business is done in Barbados.
Senator Dr Esther Byer is Minister of Labour