MINIMUM wage earners could begin to receive incomes that are closer to a liveable wage if the recommendations of the minimum wage advisory committee, which were submitted to the labour ministry earlier this year, are accepted.

Chairman of the committee, Dr Ronald Robinson, says the committee had contemplated a wide range of issues over the course of its consultations and deliberations, taking an outside-the-box approach. The final consultation was held last November.

Dr Robinson told the Jamaica Observer that the recommendations were bold. “For the first time in a long while the unions were extremely happy and the private sector was happy, too. For the first time we actually proposed an equation of sorts, taking a lot of the factors into play which would reflect the reality of expenditure in 2020 and going forward. Most of these recommendations were based on the market and a lot of empirical data,” he said.

He said part of the objective of the review and the recommendations put forward were to enhance arrangements that would enable minimum wage earners to keep more of their income. “It was a much broader approach [than wages]…to bring a different thinking, pushing it almost to liveable wages instead of the minimum,” he said.

Dr Robinson said the commission had agreed to meet at frequent intervals to review the implementation of its recommendations. “The commission’s role is broader than just the minimum wage, because persons can make applications and submissions to us regarding their status and so on. Normally, the commission would have given its report and that would have been, but we wanted to be active over the two years,” he explained.

On the advice of the commission, the minimum wage was in June 2018 raised from $6,200 to $7,000 weekly, and wages for security guards increased from $8,854 to $9,700.

General secretary of Union of Clerical Administrative and Supervisory Employees (UCASE), John Levy, said there must be a new approach taken to implement formal arrangements for minimum wage earners, such as household workers. He urged the Government to implement systems that would mandate employers to facilitate statutory deductions which would be for the workers’ benefit in the long run.

“The householder, once she reaches a certain age, suffers when she can no longer come and wash and cook and clean. I am calling on the Ministry of Labour to come up with a new approach on how we are going to deal with the issue of the social protection for these workers in that category. It is going to take some liaising with the Ministry of Finance, but it needs to be done,” he stated.

He said employers of blue collar workers are also guilty of not ensuring that these workers are properly engaged. Levy said these arrangements call for a simplified online system which allows the employers to make deductions such as National Insurance Scheme (NIS) and National Housing Trust (NHT) contributions.

“I want to see something that accommodates everybody since we say we are going digital. We cannot continue with the moral suasion anymore, we have to go a little further. We have to put the facility in place. You still have maybe 60 per cent of the workforce still not contributing to the NIS,” he said.

Last year Finance Minister Dr Nigel Clarke said that approximately 800,000 workers were not making statutory contributions. He said only 400,000 out of one million people registered with the NIS scheme at the time were making contributions.