MANDEVILLE, Manchester — Chairman of the Minimum Wage Advisory Commission Dr Ronald Robinson says the recent high court ruling in the case involving Marksman Limited and the National Housing Trust, that security guards are employees and not independent contractors, has an almost inextricable link to the Minimum Wage Act.

“… A lot the queries and the issues that are being spoken about are actually [a part] of that Act, so when you are talking about overtime and payment of holidays and how you treat with persons at that level, it is actually in the Act,” he said while addressing a minimum wage consultation session last Wednesday at the Mandeville Hotel.

In the matter which saw the National Housing Trust hauling Marksman Limited before the courts over statutory deductions in March this year, the judgement for which was handed down on Friday, September 23, 2022, the court ruled that effective then, third-party security guards employed to Marksman Security Limited are employees and not independent contractors, and that the company should immediately begin paying over their 3 per cent National Housing Trust statutory contributions. The court’s decision established a precedent for all private security companies which engage security officers as independent contractors.

Dr Robinson said the ruling has “a wider-ranging effect across industries”.

“I will hasten to tell you that this type of precedent will certainly affect a lot of other industries, because there are a lot of other industries that do rely on the minimum wage and the application. They do rely on the classification of their workers as contract workers, but that has been put to bed… Once you are classified as an employee under the law and under the Minimum Wage Act, there are certain things which are due, statutory [deductions, among] other things,” he said.

Dr Robinson said the minimum wage consultation session in Mandeville was the fourth since the start of consultations earlier this year. Ohers were held in Trelawny, Portland and St Ann. The audience in Mandeville included business, political, trade union, and civic leaders from across south-central Jamaica.

Dr Robinson, in responding to a question regarding the use of an equation to determine a suitable minimum wage, said it is being taken into consideration, and shared: “One of the things that surprised me when I became chairman was how very subjective the process of determining the minimum wage was…. It surprised me that we didn’t have in 2019 some kind of equation, data-driven way to do it. The truth of the matter is we have enough historical data to be able to create that — it is almost as if you are reading our minds — because one of the things that we have moved to do is to start the discussion and we are now in the process of creating a committee of experts to do exactly that,” he explained.

He said the committee would use data, including the consumer price index and inflation, as factors in the equation.

“I genuinely believe that any minister or any government should be able, in any given year, to plug numbers into an equation and determine what the minimum wage should be for that particular year,” he said.

The minimum wage was last increased by 28.5 per cent on April 1, 2022, from $7,000 to $9,000 per 40-hour workweek or from $175 to $225 per hour, while the minimum wage for industrial security guards moved from $9,700 to $10,500 per 40-hour workweek or from $242.50 to $262.50 per hour.