Seymour sceptical of benefits of raising minimum wage

Minister for Labour Dwayne Seymour said increasing the minimum wage is “not a big benefit” to most Caymanians and may leave them unable to afford services such as private nannies.

The minister’s comments came just weeks after the Compass reported the $6-an-hour minimum pay is 50 cents below starvation wage and leaves people vulnerable to poverty.

“They could really be in danger,” Lemuel Hurlston, head of the Minimum Wage Review Committee, said last month on the Cayman Compass Facebook talkshow ‘The Resh Hour’.

Seymour, speaking on the ‘Doctor Doug in the Morning’ show on Gold radio on Monday, 10 July, noted there may not be a lot of local support for the increase.

“You may hear a lot of Caymanians not enthused about the minimum wage because that’s not what they depend on,” he said.

While he agrees the minimum wage, which is paid mostly to foreign workers, needs to increase, he added, “Who is the minimum wage going to benefit?”

The labour minister said that when the minimum wage was introduced in 2016, the salaries of nannies doubled from $3 to $6 per hour.

“And who did that affect? It affected Caymanians who needed a nanny to care for their children, and now they can’t afford it so they have got to share a nanny now.

“So we need to understand every action has a reaction.”

The Minimum Wage Review Committee is in the process of gathering public opinion at town hall meetings and through an online survey.

One of the issues the committee is looking at is whether a different minimum wage should be associated with certain professions.

Seymour agreed with this option, saying it will “ensure that it doesn’t directly impact the society in terms of most of the population not being able to afford a lot of things”.

The committee plans to present its findings to the government at the end of September.

While the labour minister said the minimum wage will definitely go up, he said the government needs to “walk very carefully” when it gets the report.

“If it’s done straight across the board, who’s [that] going to affect? Obviously, it’s Caymanians that are going to be the ones that it affects most,” he said.

“Because it’s not a big benefit to most Caymanians in employ because they already make more than the normal minimum wage,” he said.

“So we need to understand that and appreciate it, but I don’t expect persons to come here either and work in poverty from overseas.”

People suffering

While sceptical of an increase in the minimum wage, Seymour said Caymanians, who are mostly on a higher salary, are themselves suffering from a high cost of living.

“I hear it every day that persons are saying, look, you know, everybody else is living better than us,” he said.

“People are coming here and living better than us and we’re suffering and we can’t afford groceries, we can’t afford gas.

“People are feeling left behind. I can tell you that’s the sentiment out there.”

He said government needs to pay attention and cannot pretend that there is nothing it can do.

“There’s always something that the government can do. We just need to be willing to go out there and extend ourselves,” Seymour said.

He stressed that these are tough times, adding, “It’s only one year now since we’ve been fully out of the pandemic; we had two years of shutdown.

“We cannot recover in two years. People are suffering, and the thing about Caymanians is that Caymanians are so proud, a lot of them are suffering silently.”

He added, “So we really need to ensure that we understand that the climate of the Cayman Islands, the climate of the world, is one in need. Everybody needs a boost right now.”