Michael Burke

You might know that if you eat the right fruits (read citrus) and live in a healthy environment you will not catch a cold easily. But if you do not eat right and your environment is not right, you may very well get a cold often. In such a scenario you might live on cough medicines, or perhaps on "shots" of white rum. In dealing with the symptom and not the root cause, you might very well end up living a life of having a cold more often than not.

The police, teachers and nurses have approached their salary issue by way of "cough medicine" economics. They have not used their initiative in having a permanent supplement for their income, although government will never be able to pay them what they are worth. There are two police credit unions, two teachers' credit unions and a nurses' credit union. They have not used the potential power of their credit unions. The "strike" or "sick-out" method was a useful tool in 1938. Today we should move beyond that.

Do you know how long I have been trying to get the Jamaica Cooperative Credit Union League to buy shares in hotels on behalf of their members? Seventeen years come October. The problem is that while accountants are necessary on elected boards, very few accountants can think outside the box. So I have come up with another strategy - to form a cooperative employment agency.

The first cooperatives in Jamaica were the "throw-partner" system. This came with the Yoruba tribe of Africans who were indentured servants in Jamaica after slavery. Yes, there were African indentured servants as well as Indians, Chinese and Germans. Not all the Africans who came here were slaves.

Marcus Garvey also encouraged small cooperative businesses among his members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). And he encouraged his members to join the People's Cooperative Banks, which in a real way were the forerunners to credit unions.

The small banana growers formed themselves into a cooperative in the early 1920s and Norman Washington Manley was its lawyer. By 1957 a special endowment from the United Fruit Company was used to set up Jamaica Welfare (later Jamaica Social Welfare Commission, and now Social Development Commission).

Jamaica Welfare itself went about teaching rural people cooperative principles by issuing booklets on how to form cooperatives. Then by 1941 the Young Men's Sodality of Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Cathedral formed a credit union.
The idea of credit unions grew first within the Roman Catholic Church and later blossomed outside of it. By 1950, Norman Manley as Leader of the Opposition piloted the Cooperative Act through the House of Representatives and it was passed.

With that sort of history, one would have thought that by this time our trade unions would be helping workers to form cooperatives, as obtains in other countries. A cooperative employment agency would buy shares in enterprises for the sole purpose of controlling the jobs. Eventually, the cooperative should own a few hotels.

Why hotels? Because tourism is Jamaica's greatest foreign-exchange earner. Our greatest dilemma now is that the United States can be a problem to the rest of the world but it is impossible to do without them, even if it is only their dollars. If we buy oil from Trinidad, do you think we pay them in Trinidadian currency? No, they want US dollars and we had better find those dollars or we do not get the oil. It is as simple as that.

Another reason for suggesting the purchase of shares in hotels is that I can think of nothing else that provides such a wide range of job opportunities. Can you imagine a hotel where the people who provide all the services are members? This would include the taxi drivers, the cooks, the farmers, the painters, teachers who provide the information for tours (both history and geography), nurses who provide hospitality services for sick and elderly tourists, police and security guards who provide security.

The Cooperative Employment Agency could have its own travel agency. Various types of tourists come here depending on the package that they are offered. So one could involve the sports people, especially the cyclists. Then we could involve the Rastafarians since many tourists want to know more about them. It does appear that the majority of those who visit the Bob Marley Museum are tourists. Can you imagine all those people who make figurines having their own hotel to sell their goods to?

And even the lawyers will have something. If there is a shortage of case work and some hotel rooms need to be painted, then why not paint some rooms and get some money? One principle of most cooperatives is that no job is beneath anyone. So let us say goodbye to the cough-medicine economics, where the strike or "sick-out" method is used. Who is ready to start a cooperative employment agency? We need at least 10 people.

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