Dear Editor,

Before Prime Minister Andrew Holness and Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett make the foolish mistake of importing foreign workers for the tourism industry, they need to listen to the words of fellow Cabinet Minister Delroy Chuck.

Chuck is absolutely right in his findings from talking to former workers in the industry who told him they quit working because the salaries paid to them could hardly cover the taxi fares to get to work and back. This corroborates exactly the responses I get from these workers when I question them on my twice-yearly one-month sojourns in Negril.

While Bartlett has done an excellent job in getting tourists to the island, Government has been woefully slow in providing accommodation for the workers in the tourist areas where the work, unlike parts of Cuba where accommodation is provided, sometimes within walking distance of the hotel (for example, one hotel in Holguin where I have stayed).

But the low salaries are not the worst part. Everyone knows that in the hospitality industry all over the world salaries are calculated in the knowledge that customers will tip the restaurant and hotel staff. What these ex-workers didn’t tell Chuck is this: what is happening in Jamaica is that in some cases, not all, the management does not pass on the gratuities to the workers. The effect is that when the service charge on a plate of food is not passed on to the staff, the price of the item stated on the menu is thereby surreptitiously jacked up without the customer’s knowledge. Readers may want to use a word to describe this outrageous behaviour, which I won’t (on this occasion). This has to stop.

So the leaders in the industry who complain that few new workers are entering the industry and the current ones are simply moving from one job to another should spare us the crocodile tears. It’s because the bosses won’t pay them a living wage!

Importing foreign workers, housing them, and paying them more than local workers should be a non-starter.

Errol W A Townshend

Canada

ewat@rogers.com