Jamaica’s vaccination rate needs to dramatically increase if the country is to have any hope of surviving the economic impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic. That certainly, however, is not the only challenge we would face as a nation. There’s also the health and wellness of our people and the effects on our education system if our children continue to be denied access to learning. All of this would ultimately come back to the economy in the long run — our levels of productivity, competencies, and the skills we would acquire over the next 10 or so years, and the consequences for our desire to improve the standard of living in an uncertain and unpredictable new world order.

The conflict rages between a vocal group advocating for the population to be vaccinated by any means necessary, and the silent, but resistant anti-vaxxers, or whatever name they may be called, in a battle between individual liberty and public good.

The strategy to navigate this complex and emotive issue, as well as resolve the dispute, lies not in any masterful or creative public relations or marketing campaign, but, rather, in the realm of negotiation and the integrative bargaining approach that are designed to resolve just that — conflicts.

In that search for solution, framing the negotiating strategy must take into account the external environment and the influence it would have on people’s perspectives. We simply cannot separate people for their history, context, circumstances, and conditions, and a recognition that conspiracy theories flourish in this contemporary era of post-modernity, where science is fiction and alternative facts are synonymous with truth. Where we focus on the wrong end we end up arguing over positions and not issues.

This is why negotiations in a collective bargaining setting almost always portray the characteristics of adversarialism. Both sides are locked in their positions, which ultimately elevate to threats of industrial action by one side, and the laying-off of workers by the other side if they were to cater to the other side’s demands. Public sector wage negotiations bear this out most strikingly over the years, with entrenched positions leading to a rising tide of endless blustering, primarily from the unions.

The debate surrounding the dispute over whether to become vaccinated or not is an adaptation of the distributive bargaining approach that has long been met with reprobation. We have a problem, but with the interests, concerns, and fear of both sides in the mix, the real issues have been submerged and replaced by a focus on people.

In one breath, those opposing vaccinations are described as unpatriotic, selfish, conspiracy theorists, and the list goes on. In the same breath, those pushing the vaccines are seen as colonial quislings, suppressing honesty over facts and naïve about the imperial pursuit of global corporations for profit maximisation to the detriment of people everywhere.

The debate is seemingly void of compassion, every human life matters, and to say that those who exercise the right not to take the vaccine have taken on to themselves the ‘right’ to be sick and die, and should not be offered empathy, is as equally irresponsible as those from whom sympathy is withheld because they too exercised the right to take the vaccine, and believing, therefore, they have the ‘right’ to develop complications and the ‘right’ to die. Once an attack on person, or the lack of empathy take centre stage around any negotiation table, you can forget about a resolution.

Studies at the Harvard Business School and the works of scholars like Richard Walton, Robert McKersie, Harry Katz, Thomas Kochan, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, and The University of the West Indies’ Dr Noel Cowell, have provided the template for successful negotiations. We first need to focus on people’s underlying fears and concerns. But to do that we have to learn to talk less and listen more. Poor listeners, according to a recent Columbia University’s Business School study, have little or no influence at the workplace “irrespective of how compelling their logic or concise their arguments”. Around the negotiating table, we therefore cannot spurn arguments and dismiss them all as conspiracy theory — although some are indeed so.

The delegates who objected because I agreed with management in a wage negotiation some years ago that the year’s inflation rate was significantly lower than the previous year, were engaged in a conspiracy of sorts. Framing negotiations in a context in which genuine concerns are not listened to will result in a failed outcome. Greek philosopher Plato would be quick to remind us that that we must allow people to think and not try and confuse them with facts. His most famous student, Aristotle, would go on the develop three modes for persuasive negotiations — logos, pathos and ethos; the latter, of course, being in sync with former politician K D Knight’s assertion as to who should be the messenger.

How then do we end this dispute? Firstly, in distributive bargaining, a single focus issue will not achieve the desired results. We want people to be vaccinated, but we cannot ignore the wider context in which their fears have been generated.

The Cuban vaccines, for example, need to be an option available to people, and it is certainly in the interest of Caricom to advocate for World Health Organization’s approval. This is an option that many people have expressed a desire for, and they should be made to feel their interests are taken on board. Secondly, in widening the option and moving away from a single focus, both Ivermectin and Nitzoxande must be seriously considered in light of emerging new evidence of the success of a series of experimentations carried out in a number of countries in the Latin American region. They are not substitutes for the vaccinations, but used under conditions of well-regulated clinical trials, as authorised by the WHO, that could save lives in the interim.

Many fully vaccinated people have stopped observing the Ministry of Health’s stated protocols. They could very well be asymptomatic and are the ones spreading the virus. We simply do not know because no clinical evidence is available. The management who during a wage negotiation make claims as to their inability to pay, but change out their fleet of motor vehicles, while subtly suggesting workers may be responsible for the company’s poor performance, have effectively removed trust from the negotiating process. To give the impression that the non-vaccinators are the super-spreaders without the supporting science is moving us away from the heart of the problem and, thus, the opportunity to find the right solution.

Forgive me, but I’m back to Aristotle who said: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.”

Where we are now means more options have to be put on the table; the focus needs centre on interests not positions; the health protocols must be slavishly observed by all; there must be honesty over facts, and an acknowledgement that the science has yet run its clinical course.

It is to a negotiating strategy we must now turn in finding a solution to the pandemic for the sake of Jamaica, land we love!

Danny Roberts is a labour educator and lead partner at IR Plus Consultants. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or strebord02@gmail.com.