- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 04/Aug 05:11

From make-work to sustainable jobs

THE PM's dismissal of the Cepep, URP and National Reforestation Programme as creating a nation of "grass-cutters" was harsh, but hardly out of line. These make-work programmes have not lived up to their ambition to develop a workforce capable of moving beyond baseline labour. The 300 contractors fired from the Cepep programme were undeniably overseeing operations that fail to meet private-sector standards of execution or productivity. Last month, Legal Affairs Minister Saddam Hosein further claimed that 32 of the 326 Community-Based Environmental Protection and Enhancement Programme (Cepep) contractors were struck off the Companies Registry. Were the bonafides of these contractors validated as part of the broad renewal of Cepep contractors just before the last general election? If not, the concerns of the government about that renewal, set alongside the statement by Cepep CEO Keith Eddy that he faced "intense pressure" from former minister of rural development and local government Faris Al-Rawi to push through contractor renewals worth $1.4 billion, is even more troubling. The claims that state payments channelled through these operations are financing criminal activity are both persistent and unacceptable. The concerns of Defence Minister Wayne Sturge about money paid to ghost gangs is clearly merited but must be balanced against the undeniable tragedy of the abrupt firing of 10,000 workers who made their labour available to these contractors only to be punished for it. Only the Unemployment Relief Programme (URP) is expressly a make-work programme, but each of these entities operates with a dangerously laissez faire attitude to productivity while offering no training or skills-development programmes that have tangibly improved the employability of their workforce. When the Cepep programme was scrapped in June, a rethinking of the project was promised. There have been no moves to offer a better strategy for improving manual labour at the lowest levels in TT, no plan to deliver a service that both meets the maintenance needs of the country while training and educating its workforce to become useful beyond government support. The sitting government must be aware that firing thousands of people with little or nothing in the way of a financial safety net is a profoundly bad idea. These are, as Laventille West MP Kareem Marcelle pointed out, "real people and real lives." The opposition's choice to respond to the firings with talk of legal battle has done nothing to change the hard reality for those who are most direly affected. The history of such programmes, which include the Development Employment Work Division (DEWD) programme in the 1960s and the Local Initiative and Development (LID) programme in the 1980s provides no notable success stories of workers or contractors graduating to successful entrepreneurship. A system that creates 300 contractors with a single client, the government, is not creating entrepreneurship, it is ensuring continued dependency. The post From make-work to sustainable jobs appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.