Minister of Industry, Investment and Commerce Aubyn Hill is calling on Jamaican employers to pay their employees better as part of efforts to stem the migration of skilled labour and to attract and keep workers to avert a crisis that is threatening continued economic growth.

“If you’re not paying the right price, you not going to find any [workers] and you going to lose the ones that you’ve trained,” Hill said as he joined a discussion at the Terra Nova Hotel in St Andrew Tuesday amongst stakeholders at the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica’s (PSOJ) president breakfast forum. The forum was held under the theme: ‘Let’s Get Serious about our Logistics-Centred Economy and Special Economic Zones.’

“Clearly you don’t want production to get out of place where it’s not competitive, but we have to react to the market force,” Hill cited in carefully chosen words to avoid a backlash.

He said while the Government will continue to train and certify people, businesses will have to adjust to keep Jamaican workers in the country.

“Even though salaries overseas look appealing, more persons are likely to stay and work in Jamaica if their salaries can cover basic necessities,” Hill expounded as he added, “if they can get a reasonable salary here, send their children to school, pay their rent, [then] they probably will not leave.”

He said while he does not expect employers to increase salaries 10 times to match those paid in the United States, employers can still do much better where salaries are concerned.

The issue of a shortage of skilled labour in Jamaica has been raised more often in the last year. In March, Prime Minister Andrew Holness again acknowledged the problem at a Jamaica National Service Corps Residential Camps launch saying he fields the calls from employers who can’t find skilled labour.

“We have about 150,000 unattached youngsters without prospects. We must reach them, we must bring them into the labour force, because that is how the country is going to grow,” he asserted.

However, PB Scott, a former PSOJ president and current chairman and CEO of the Musson Group, said the issue has become so critical, it is threatening continued economic growth.

“My concern is essentially, we have to have a policy commitment to upskilling and training and ensuring we have a workforce,” Scott noted in reference to the constant talks about moving up the value chain in the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector. He went on to explain that although investors are interested in setting up in Jamaica, they are discouraged by the lack of adequate skilled labour.

“To make an investment and create a thousand seat facility, you absolutely need to probably have access to about 2,ooo people,” Scott added. However, he said the sector is challenged to find the number of people it wants who are skilled in technology and professionalism to enhance Jamaica’s reputation.

While some employers offer training to help plug the skilled labour shortage, Scott said it won’t deliver sustainable growth.

“We have to upskill [and] move up the value chain. We have to not just be answering telephones. We need to be doing more advanced things and earning more money from that, and that feeds into the upskilling [cycle]. But we need to find a gap to replace the 20,ooo people who are leaving” said Scott.

He noted that most of the people who leave Jamaica do so for higher salaries.

“The gap for a trucker, he can drive a year in Florida and get a US$100,000. He’s not getting 10 per cent of that in Jamaica. Even with wage inflation that gap is still going to be extreme and the direction of the labour flow is not going to necessarily change.”

He further stated that other factors affecting the availability of the workforce is that the birth rate is falling.

In addition to that, Scott pointed to internal migration which also impacts employment availability.

“Development needs to go where it attracts labour because no production can happen without labour,” he said while noting that situating development where people live would reduce some of the traffic flow.

“I think policies around where development goes has to be connected to housing, education and where people are likely to be,” he continued.

More suggestions for possible solutions were thrown into the discussion by Opposition spokesman on industry, investment and global logistics Anthony Hylton.

“Automation is an option, a critical one that we have to look at to balance out that equation,” Hylton said. “If we’re going to move our economy and our labour force to a higher plain, then we have to look at the quality of the training and then mix that with technology in automation. I think if we’re committed to that, we can begin to solve that problem.”