Ross Sheil, Staff Reporter
Horace Peterkin (right), president of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association, chats with Rotary Club of Kingston President Stephen Wedderburn, (centre) and Rotarian Mike Fennell. Mr. Peterkin was guest speaker at the Rotary Club's weekly luncheon at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel in New Kingston, yesterday. - RUDOLPH BROWN/CHIEF PHOTOGRAPHER
THE HEAD of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association (JHTA) has called for the private sector to train and employ inner-city youths as part of an effort to prevent crime from putting the nation out of business.
JHTA President Horace Peterkin yesterday urged private sector leaders to emulate a youth training scheme run by Sandals Montego Bay, where he is general manager.
Speaking at a Rotary Club of Kingston luncheon at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel, New Kingston, Mr. Peterkin said the Sandals scheme had been adopted by the JHTA and would be launched in several other hotels in September.
The Sandals resort's Private Sector Youth Career Development Scheme is in its second year and recruits 25 persons annually from the neighbouring inner-city community of Flankers, St. James.
Seventy five per cent of those recruits are male.
The scheme now has a syllabus from the HEART Trust/NTA and is supported by the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce and the Jamaica Employers Federation.
"Not to participate in something like this is to our peril, because eventually this crime thing is going to devour us, we won't be able to operate our businesses in Jamaica," Mr. Peterkin said.
"If Jamaica had a different image - an image of a friendly law-abiding ... society we could literally double our (hotel room) rates," he argued.
Mr. Peterkin said the community of Flankers was similar to many other inner-city communities with high youth unemployment. He lamented that, because so many youth have "this terrible address they are not going to get an opportunity because if they put this on the application form ... a lot of us will not hire them."
TRIED AND PROVEN
Mr. Peterkin said the scheme was tried and proven and should become a national standard through which businesses could act as training centres.
He said Sandals alone offered 30 different types of occupations.
He noted that participants had been celebrated in their community with several having found employment on cruise ships through the United States overseas employment
programme.
Mr. Peterkin said trainees in the scheme could fill the 15,000 new jobs that hotel construction would offer within the tourism industry in the next five years.
