Independent Senator Sir Roy Trotman has rapped the private sector for not capitalizing on fostering the element of productivity which was a key element in the Social partnership when it was formed over a decade ago.
Speaking during debate on the resolution to note and approve Protocol VI of the Social Partnership 2011-2013 today, Sir Roy said after 1994 productivity was pushed into the background and today only a few companies actually invest in training and retraining their employees and making them productive.
“Productivity has always been put forward by the trade union movement and we have a government that has put forward the Productivity Council, but we have an employer class that was not greatly concerned with it,” he told the Upper House during yesterday’s pre-lunch sitting.
Lamenting the lack of training in many companies which ironically complained of employees not being productive, the Barbados Workers’ Union general secretary said productivity today was “something being devoutly wished for but not exactly being practised in the way we would’ve wanted”.
He said the Productivity Council was not only an offspring of the Social Partnership but it had gone throughout the Caribbean teaching, preaching and showing others how Barbados’ productivity system had been able to work for the benefit and advantage of the average Barbadian.
“We have had a major setback in that and that major setback is stemming from the fact that although the employers were in total agreement at the very outset, when they began to see room for development after 1994 … they started pushing productivity enhancement and development further and further into the background until it reached the stage where they did not want to hear the term,” he told senators.
Turning to another Social Partnership offspring, the National Initiative for Service Excellence (NISE), Sir Roy said this too had not achieved all it could have because of broken promises of funding from the private sector.However, in reply, Independent Senator Geoffrey Cave, a director of Barbados’ leading department store Cave Shepherd & Co. Ltd., said he was not aware of the private sector failing to honour productivity enhancement.
In fact, he said, the employers had done a good job in maintaining many of the entities spawned by the Social Partnership, including NISE and the National productivity Council. (RJ)
