PM
Manning on foreign workers:
Outside labour
a must for
growth
Port Spain
Petroleumworldtt.com
01 20 08
Tobago has reached full employment.
There
is no labour left in Tobago. That is the reality
of it. Labour imported from Guyana, Venezuela
and Colombia is servicing Tobago’s tourism
sector.
And
in order for the Government to expand its hotel
plant in T&T and accelerate its development
programme, it has to do so with foreign labour.
Those
were the arguments Prime Minister Patrick Manning
laid out to justify the increased presence
of foreign labour in T&T.
He
was speaking at a luncheon organised by the T&T
Chamber of Industry and Commerce at the newly
opened Hyatt Regency Trinidad, 1 Wrightson
Road, Port-of-Spain.
“There is no labour left in Tobago. That
is the reality of it. It is maxed out,” Manning
said.
He
said Tobago’s hotel sector can only be
expanded if T&T’s immigration laws are
liberalised. And if the Government incorporates
into its thinking and economic planning the need
to have free movement of skills and to import the
skills from outside T&T.
He said a week ago, the Hyatt had 360 members
of staff and was working to have a complement of
420.
“They
had some challenges getting the labour, but they
got it. In other words, as we expand our
hotel plant, we are going to have to depend heavily
on labour from outside.”
Commenting
on the origins of the Hyatt’s
chefs and housekeepers, Manning said the Hyatt
hotel now manages the Prime Minister’s residence
and diplomatic centre. Its executive housekeeper
is from Goa, India.
“This
is the reality. That is the world in which we
live. It is a globalised world.
“We are competing against all comers and,
therefore, the restrictive policy, restrictions,
that talk about domestic as opposed to foreign
in circumstances where you don’t even have
the domestics to provide it, are outdated and can
find no basis in modern economic and industrial
thinking.
“To accelerate our development programme,
to be able to accelerate our development programme,
we have to go on the basis of labour from outside
T&T.”
He
said the Prime Minister’s residence was
built in eight months on the basis of Chinese labour.
He
added as T&T’s development programme
picked up, it has had to do like other countries
and develop using outside labour.
“Those
are standard international practices. We either
do it that way or we curtail our growth
and development. We have been urged to curtail
our growth and development.
“We
have made it clear. We do not intend to do that.”
Range of skills
The range of skills for which the Ministry of
National Security has granted work permits to foreigners
runs the gamut from a pizza chef to a chief engineer.
Following is an indication of the variety of skills
which companies have filled out applications for
the approval of work permits:
-construction managers/consultants
- electricians
- engineers
- crane operators
- seamen
- divers
- accountants
- pilots
- architects
- lecturers
- sea captains
- health and safety officers/managers
- drilling managers/engineers
- offshore engineers/managers
- project surveyors
- quality assurance managers/inspectors
- welding inspectors/supervisors
- financial experts/analysts
- heavy equipment supervisors
- optometrists
Story by
Sandra Chouthi from The Trinidad Guardian
- sandy9@ttol.co.tt
The
Trinidad Guardian
Thursday, January 17th 2008
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