Martin Henry
I write as Audley Shaw delivers the alternative Budget of the JLP Opposition in Parliament. Right after Finance Minister, Dr. Omar Davies, had delivered
the Government's Budget last Thursday, the Opposition quickly responded that that was not the real Budget.
The Gleaner reported Shaw the following day as warning that the nation would face the real budget when the Supplementary Estimates are tabled later this year. And, of course, he has a point, sharpened by hard experience.
The People's National Party (PNP) President and Prime Minister has come to the office with enormous goodwill, hope and trust reposed in her. In a strange split, people trust the leader much more than they trust the Government she leads. And it is only a matter of time before there has to be a rational adjustment of these different trust levels.
BACK ON WARPATH
The trade unions representing both public and private sector workers are back on the warpath. There have been recent eruptions in bauxite and sugar. Unions representing public sector workers are locked in negotiating MoU2 with the Government. Industrial relations simmer with distrust.
And yet without trust, social and economic life can make no significant progress. In recent years, an enormous 'social capital' literature in which the importance of trust figures prominently has been produced. Even the hard-nosed World Bank has led a research project on social capital. But research is only serving to confirm commonsense: If people can't learn to trust each other, they will not work together to achieve common goals.
Carl Stone's classic little 1982 'Work Attitude Survey' is one of his few works which remain on the market as a widely used text in all kinds of courses. Stone's survey was in fact commissioned by Prime Minister Edward Seaga "for the purpose of providing data that are expected to assist the ... Task Force set up by the Government to advise on worker output, productivity and labour relations in Jamaica."
LITTLE CHANGE
Not much has changed in the data in nearly two and a half decades. Jamaica has even had the dubious distinction of achieving declining productivity in one phase of its post-independence economic history. The present Prime Minister, who is very personally interested in productivity and labour relations, as well as her new Minister of Labour, should read Stone's little book.
A fundamental Stone finding was the importance of worker-management relations, hinging on trust, in worker motivation and output. "The human-relations dimension of worker-management relations emerges as the most frequently mentioned area of dissatisfaction with the overall work environment," the survey found.
The same must be true of political mobilisation for nation building, and of social action for community improvement.
In his now famous 1998 Grace Kennedy Foundation Lecture, 'Vision and Voluntarism', which has become a textbook like Stone's 'Work Attitude Survey', Don Robotham convincingly argued that "the post-Emancipation history of Jamaica was strikingly different [worse] than Barbados" because of the absence of a capacity for compromise among contending parties. "Each side preferred to see the entire system fail rather than to search for some area of common ground for action."
Emancipation itself, he asserted, "was made possible because a deal was struck" between the contending sides, a "triumph of that very English spirit of compromise". A spirit, by the way, on which functional parliamentary democracy is based. The Jamaican recalcitrance has continued into and defined the political history of independent Jamaica. So much so that even within a single political party there were expectations that those who did not support 'Sister P' in her presidential bid should be punished. Now that she wears the crown, a la Las May's cartoons, she should lead the nation in trust building and the strategies of compromise. An excellent place to begin is by taking on board, with due recognition, as many Opposition proposals as possible in crafting the 'real Budget' from the Debate.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
