One week after the removal of former Deputy Premier Chris Saunders, Cabinet has repealed a requirement initiated under his watch for temporary jobs to be advertised before work-permit applications were submitted.
Workforce Opportunities & Residency Cayman, in a notice issued Friday afternoon, said that the requirement, announced last month – and set to come into force 31 March – to advertise on the JobsCayman portal before submitting any work-permit applications has been repealed.
Saunders, who Premier Wayne Panton said he asked to step down following complaints about his conduct, had been implementing a more stringent approach to the work-permit and immigration process.
No formal reason was given for the change in policy.
Bodden Town East MP Dwayne Seymour, in the aftermath of Saunders’s departure, was named Minister for Border Control and Labour.
It was under Saunders’s watch that complaints about delays in the processing of permits and permanent residency applications emerged, which he attributed to closer scrutiny by those in WORC.
In 2022, WORC processed 55,000 applications. Of those, it approved 21,040 temporary work permits, the statement noted. And in January this year, it approved 1,830 temporary work permits.
WORC, in its notice, added, “progress continues on preparing the new online system and WORC is committed to improving processing times”.
Under the now-repealed regulation employers would have been required to advertise all local full-time and part-time job vacancies on the JobsCayman portal for 14 days prior to the submission of a temporary work-permit application – similar to the process for applying for full work permits.
Saunders, in announcing the requirement last month, said it was hoped that the new regulation will “encourage both job-seeking Caymanians and employers wishing to attract and retain talent to register on the portal now that it’s a requirement to post all available jobs whether full-time or temporary before a work permit is issued”.
WORC Director Jeremy Scott, in supporting the change, said last month that the new requirement “means that more jobs will be posted on the portal, therefore WORC will be better able to assess the employment industry, as well as forecast what required skills job seekers need in an effort to close gaps that are in particular employment categories”.
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Well, this was a common-sense and almost a “no brainer” decision! Well done PACT re-shuffled Cabinet! Anybody in their right mind should not have expected the young and under-resourced WORC Department to have been able to handle this huge volume of new work! They cannot keep up with the demands now. This would have been a disaster for small employers. The reason why most (not all) employers use the Temporary Work Permits option is that the annual WP Grants seem to take such as long time.
We are still trying to use a 1972 Immigration control model in the year 2023! The WORC Dept. and the Ministry must now “work” on sorting out the dysfunctional JobCayman portal, which is also totally ineffective and subject to paralysis. The entire Immigration/Human Capital system requires a comprehensive overhaul. I have been calling for this for decades, but it is falling on deaf ears but with excellent lip service by successive political directorates.