While the majority of businesses are providing Caymanians with job opportunities, Minister for Labour Chris Saunders says there still are companies which do not and that “remains a challenge”.
However, Saunders, who is also deputy premier, in an effort to address this issue and offer protection for Caymanians in the job market, has announced that he is working on establishing the Fairness Employment Opportunities Commission, the brainchild of former Premier Alden McLaughlin.
Saunders, speaking on the Cayman Compass Facebook talkshow ‘The Resh Hour’ on Wednesday, 1 March, said to McLaughlin’s credit he raised the idea of the commission as a means to address discrimination against Caymanians in the workplace, but it did not move forward.
However, Saunders said he and his team at the Labour Ministry are working on creating the commission, though it will still have to go through caucus and the Cabinet for “the full tweaking”.
Fine-tuning needed
“We do recognise is that if someone applies for a work permit and that work permit is turned down, they actually have an avenue to appeal… [but] what happens when it is a Caymanian that gets turned down for different [reasons]? That avenue [to appeal] really isn’t available to some extent. So we do recognise that that is something that we need to fix,” Saunders said.
He noted these are the types of issues that government is working on and will fine-tune through the Strategic Policy Statement process.
“It is one of the things that I really would love to get that legislation in place for this year because there still exists discrimination within the workforce,” he said.
He added Cayman’s overall unemployment rate currently stands at 2.1% with the Caymanian unemployment rate at 3.6%.
This, he said, is below the natural rate of unemployment; however, it also means there are around 1,200 Caymanians still unemployed.
“Roughly around 60% of them have been unemployed for over a year,” he said, explaining that is the reason government has been focusing on training development, “…upskilling them to get them back into the workforce”.
He added that government cannot forget the tens of thousands of Caymanians who are employed, and is pushing for more opportunities for them as well as looking to protect their jobs.
“We still have Caymanians that are overqualified doing jobs that they shouldn’t be doing. They’re management material, they’re middle management material, they’re supervising material and they’re still doing entry-level work,” he said, creating a challenge to getting the next crop of entry-level Caymanians in the door.
Underemployment remains an issue
He pointed out that one major concern for government is the underemployment rate.
Government’s goal, he said, is to move qualified Caymanians farther up the chain to make space for the 1,200 people who are not employed to move into entry-level work.
“I’ve known parents who have mortgaged their house taking out loans to give their kids an education, and then the child is coming back and getting paid less had they not even gone off to school and continued working in their jobs,” he said.
This, he said, is why his ministry and, by extension, the government, wants to focus on the the Fair Employment Opportunities Commission “where we can start zooming in and say ‘Wait a minute, I’m sorry but you need to give this person an opportunity'”.
He added, however, a balance must be naturally found and “you don’t want to be forcing businesses to take on people”.
Saunders also acknowledged, “some people’s attitude stinks and some people are just not team players”.
“This is why we need to make sure that training [is not just] a matter of the actual skills in terms of doing the job but also the soft skills… because there are people that come with a chip on their shoulder, [that] come with a sense of entitlement.”
And Saunders added, at the end of the day in Cayman, “you can’t say to somebody, ‘I want you to hire that person'”.
However, he noted, “there is some level of discrimination and that is one of the things that we need to fix”.
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