Dear Editor,

Norman “Teacher” Collins, in his August-20 letter to the editor — published in this newspaper — entitled ‘Landless masses: A legacy of our colonial past’ is correct to place the Cooper’s Pen dispute within Jamaica’s long history of landlessness, Emancipation, the Morant Bay Rebellion, and the labour struggles of 1938.

But I would take his argument one step further. The deeper issue is not simply land reform, it is whether political independence has been accompanied by sufficient economic transformation to enable working Jamaicans to purchase land, secure decent housing, save, invest, and build intergenerational wealth.

Land redistribution alone cannot solve the problem if workers remain trapped by wages that make ownership practically impossible. We must, therefore, distinguish between a minimum wage and a living wage. A minimum wage establishes the lowest lawful payment for labour, while a living wage asks a more consequential question: What must a person earn to house a family decently, meet essential expenses, save, invest, and participate meaningfully in society?

There is an uncomfortable historical continuity here. Slavery extracted labour without wages. Apprenticeship, after 1834, declared people free while compelling them to continue providing labour to former enslavers. Post-emancipation Jamaica then developed around low wages, restricted access to productive land, and dependence upon those who controlled capital.

The modern minimum wage is certainly not slavery, and minimum-wage legislation was not created to enslave workers. Yet when full-time labour still leaves generations unable to acquire basic assets, we should ask whether an old colonial principle survives in another form: legal freedom without sufficient economic power.

Our housing history also deserves examination. As a child, some of the first visibly small houses I encountered were government-built homes for poorer Jamaicans — the so-called “matchbox houses”. Meanwhile, middle-income developments offered noticeably larger and aesthetically complete homes.

Many working-class homeowners then spent 15 or 20 years adding bedrooms, verandahs, kitchens, and other improvements merely to achieve what more affluent households could purchase at the beginning. Money that might otherwise have financed education, investments, businesses, or retirement was consumed completing the house.

Therefore, even when unintended, architecture can reinforce class.

Economic decolonisation must mean more than giving citizens access to a piece of land. It must give working-class people the economic capacity to acquire, develop, and retain property without sacrificing a lifetime merely making an inadequate house adequate.

The danger is not the existence of a minimum wage, it is the normalisation of minimum living.

Political freedom gave Jamaicans citizenship. Economic transformation must now give that citizenship material substance.

Dudley C McLean II

dm15094@gmail.com