Martin Henry, Contributor
A NATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY conference runs for three days later this week. In the published line-up of seven "Featured Presenters" only one could be said to be a market producer of anything. The others are politicians, public servants and academicians.
Beyond the usual political platitudes about the need to improve productivity, it is difficult to see what of substance the prime minister and the minister of labour would add to a productivity conference, unless they are going to surprise us with fresh policy prescriptions, backed by tax dollars, to drive an increase of productivity. We will see on Tuesday.
World records
Jamaica holds many world records, not all as positive as Usain Bolt's speed and medal records. Jamaica has the negative distinction of registering considerable periods of decline and stagnation in productivity since the 1970s when almost everywhere else in the world registered growth of output per unit of input.
Perhaps we should stop talking. I am serious. Both the volume and quality of our talk are hindrances to productivity and are deserving of serious communication study. Digicel has counted us among its best customers in the world for call minutes per capita. And, knowing this, telecoms adverts are luring us to talk and talk at reduced costs. Our meetings are too many and too long. The length of the weekly Cabinet meetings could well be an index of our talk: productivity ratio.
Time is money; and not only do we talk too much, but our talk is filled with platitudinous fluff and inexactitudes. And the more official it is, the more we don't know what it really means. Years ago, in a meeting with Israeli education consultants - that I attended in the office of that superachiever of blessed memory, Gloria Knight - maverick educator Val Chambers leaned over in the middle of their presentation. "Martin, bwoy, yuh nuh hear how them man yah soun, different from wi!" They certainly did in the crisp, pointed clarity of their presentation. And Israel certainly is different from Jamaica in performance and productivity.
A prime minister serious about improving productivity will make a short delivery packed with specifics. Many, perhaps most, of those productivity-improvement specs have nothing to do with jiggling 'macroeconomic parameters' or even the traditional calls for improved technology and access to capital, as important as those undeniably are.
Let's look at just a few of these factors: Closing a railway and hauling goods in trucks by road and moving people by tens of thousands of five-seater route taxis is just an extraordinary waste of resources and time. Pearnel Charles, now minister of labour, has repented of his contribution to the debacle of unproductive, indeed counterproductive, public transport while minister of transport in the 1980s.
Better transit system
A quick, smooth, relatively low-cost mass transit system is just so vital for national productivity.
The vast majority of the Jamaican labour force is unskilled with no specific training for the jobs they do, and do by unreflective trial and error and by being constantly micro-managed. The minister of labour should share his alarm with his prime minister from his discovery that many of those turning up at the ministry for overseas employment don't have a good grasp of that most basic productivity tool: literacy. Fix that for improving productivity at comparatively low input costs.
No one needs to advise the prime minister on how crime hampers productivity. Crime destroys business opportunities and business-improvement opportunities. Crime imposes high security and other costs upon business. I heard hotel magnate John Issa complaining about this on radio. And during the past week, there was another media outbreak on the pervasive presence of extortion and its costs. Fix that.
Doing business with the Government is another huge anti-productivity factor. Karl Samuda, minister of industry, investment and commerce, says he is committed to fixing that. Samuda is in charge of the Jamaica Productivity Centre, the host organisation for the productivity conference, as well as for the Jamaica Business Development Centre. Radio Jamaica's reporter Archibald Gordon did a delightful vox pop on the public's knowledge, rather ignorance, of the Opposition People's National Party's 'Progressive Agenda'. Answers were hilarious!
Gordon should run a vox pop on the Productivity Centre and the Business Development Centre. The truth is these are tiny non-entities which are in no position, as is, to drive performance and productivity. The prime minister should say at the productivity conference what the Government plans to do to make these non-entities brand-name national institutions. The Government is far more intent on bigging up already large sports heroes, never mind the costs in time and money.
Boosting worker morale
The productivity conference will have a session called "An End to Business as Usual - Changing the Mindset of the Jamaican Workforce." Poor scapegoat workers! There is a lot wrong with them, like the lack of skills and low morale, but it is the business of management to raise productivity levels, and they should get fired if they can't.
In Carl Stone's now-vintage "Work Attitudes Survey" done for the Seaga Administration in 1982, he noted that, "... distrust of management by workers [for justifiable reasons] limits the ability of management to motivate workers to produce more ... . The problem cannot be solved by merely treating with labour-relations laws, procedures and channels for dispute settlement."
Stone offered hope and guidance for resolution: "The fact that our data indicate that a number of enterprises have dealt with this problem effectively by good management," he noted, "is an indication that it is treatable and there is no basis for accepting the gloomy perspectives of social analysts who see it as so embedded in our culture, history and social structure that we might as well accept the problem as given and move on from there."
It should be those high-performance managers from high-productivity enterprises who should be the exemplary guest speakers at a productivity conference. But they may be too busy getting the job done rather than 'wasting time' talking.
The reduction of Stone's survey to the status of an academic paper for 26 years across administrations, instead of the action paper it was intended to be, speaks volumes about Government's lack of seriousness of purpose to raise productivity levels. Can the 2008 National Productivity Conference make a difference? Not if they just talk some more in 'Fatspeak'.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Feedback may be sent to medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.
