Management consultant, Dr Trevor Hamilton, says negotiations between employers and employees should transcend the traditional powder keg of bargaining for wages.

According to Hamilton, employees must negotiate for training opportunities as part of wage-and-fringe-benefit packages in an effort to improve their employability.

"It is not going work that way anymore (bargaining for wages only). All good workers, who want to look to the future, would want to make sure that they don't only have money income - because it is eaten up by inflation, taxes and so on," said Hamilton. "What you want is knowledge income."

Channel funds into training

Hamilton made his comments during an address at a meeting of the Rotary Club of downtown Kingston at the Hilton hotel on Wednesday.

He said about 30 per cent of companies' payrolls should be channelled into training.

"If you work in a company for four years, even if you were underpaid, and you lose your job, but you leave the company with an MBA that they paid for, you are ahead of the game," he said.

Hamilton added that companies, many of which are seeking to outsource their core business because of economic difficulties, should offer employees on the brink of layoff first bite.

"If you have 200 employees you want to get rid of and they were operating a certain function, what you should in fact do is help them become incorporated and outsource the function to them," he said.

Tax holidays

He noted that political administrations had practised this in the past by outsourcing the Government Printery to employees several years ago. He suggested, however, that policy be developed to extend tax holidays to domestic companies, which choose to outsource functions to employees.

"If somebody is going to invest into a company to save his job and 199 other employees jobs, why can't we give them a tax holiday? We are quick to bail out companies that lose money, but we are not giving a tax holiday to people who are going into domestic investment," he argued.