THE Incorporated Masterbuilders Association of Jamaica (IMAJ) is urging the Government to gazette a four-month-old agreement for the building and construction industry, giving it the teeth needed to ensure local and international players pay the country’s workers a liveable wage.

“We need the Labour Management Agreement (LMA) to be honoured by all participants and practitioners in the industry in this country. It requires the input and the backing of the Government, who we have been lobbying,” IMAJ Second Vice-President Paul Williams told the Jamaica Observer last Thursday.

Like many other fields, the lure of more money and the novelty of working beyond Jamaica’s shores is a double whammy that has seen the local construction industry reeling from a tight supply of labour. The LMA was signed February 11, 2025, outlining a 10 per cent across-the-board increase in salaries effective the first of that month. It also speaks to another nine per cent increase effective February 1, 2026. In addition to labourers and contractors, the agreement covers other groups that fall under the IMAJ umbrella and affiliate members such as hardware stores and other suppliers.

Among those present at the signing ceremony were the Labour Minister Pearnel Charles Jr and representatives of the major trade unions.

“The minister of labour and social security showed their willingness by witnessing and participating but it needs to go a step further to getting it gazetted, which forces all players in the industry — locals, our guests — to honour what is signed. Our members cannot do a tender at rates below what is signed on their behalf while our guests are tendering at lower rates that put them at an advantage. The playing field needs to be levelled,” argued Williams.

“For a lot of the big jobs, the main contractors are not necessarily Jamaican contractors. We have gotten complaints, including in recent times, of non-Jamaican firms paying as little as 66 per cent of the rate,” he added.

He said successive administrations, across political parties, have shied away from providing the public endorsement gazetting gives.

“We have been trying for years to get the Government, regardless of whoever is in government, to gazette this document to ensure that all players in the sector are bound by it. We have not had that buy-in from successive governments,” said the IMAJ executive member. “We have had complaints about, in particular, our non-local guests who are participants in the industry who do not adhere to these guidelines and to the industry standard. They state, and we have had it repeated to us, that they are not members of the IMAJ so we cannot bound them, we do not have the legal authority. If it were gazetted then the laws of the land would bound them.”

Williams said IMAJ members, for the most part, have been paying the increased wages, and where there are complaints that they have not complied then moral suasion is used to get them to fall in line.

As managing director of Complete Development Solutions Limited, he has seen first-hand how challenging it is to hold onto workers when the salary is not competitive. Under an MOU the IMAJ signed with HEART/NSTA Trust, 15 tilers who worked with him as independent contractors were upskilled and got certification.

“They were working the job and after we got them certified with HEART, 11 of them left and went down the islands. In very short order, they’re in Cayman and Anguilla and other islands. So, you hone the skills and get them up to a level and then you have to start again,” Williams told the Sunday Observer.

He said he wasn’t even given a chance to try and match the offers they got, and only knew they were not in Jamaica when he tried to contact them for a job. He was told to try them again in a few months.

“Nobody said that they got an offer; they just disappeared. A lot of it is the salary, but some of it is the opportunity to travel and live a different experience. We can’t not factor that in,” he said.

According to Williams, other tradesmen such as plumbers and welders take the same approach, working in another country for three-to-six-month stints then returning to their jobs in Jamaica. And while the lure of living abroad cannot be ignored, IMAJ’s stance is that the salaries paid locally are too low.

Williams pointed out that bumping up the salary is not a financial hurdle as the cost can be rolled into existing projects.

“There are clauses in the contract for fluctuation. If there is a legally signed new rate, they can claim. You say, ‘The rates have increased legitimately, so you’ll have to pay us additional monies to pay the new rates.’ So it’s not a cost, per se, to the contractor; there’s not a hurdle for them to overcome in paying the rates,” he explained.

He sees the reluctance to pay more as “a way of exploiting the Jamaican labour force”.

Williams warned of the dangers of not paying a fair wage.

“It’s pointless if you have staff that is not earning a liveable wage [as] it is going to blow back on you — be it that your production is low, be it that they are pilfering. We strive at IMAJ to, in conjunction with the unions, [rigorously calculate] what is a liveable wage, because if you carry people outside of a liveable wage they’re going to try and find other ways to live while benefiting from you,” he cautioned.