Your lead story in Friday, 19 December’s issue confirms what I stated in my latest publication, ‘De-Constructing Development’. That statement was emphatic in insisting that a ‘minimum wage’ is not the panacea to improving the circumstances of the poor.
My commentary went on to suggest a more effective strategy to cushion the lowest wage earners against any advantage lost when prices rose in reaction to the wage increase is to implement what development economists and sociologists term ‘a living wage’.
With this minimum wage, we will have to worry about inflationary trends. I can already see the market changing, as many low-wage workers are opting to leave the jurisdiction because of the high cost of living.
The challenge which we in the Cayman Islands face is a universal one, triggered by ‘globalisation’. An effective solution demands much more than a reactionary move to increase the minimum wage, for, in so doing, we may only be ‘kicking the can further down the road’.
I applaud the new political directorate for the steps they are taking to address the current challenges – challenges which went unaddressed by many of us who occupied the positions they now hold.
Be that as it may, however, if we are to surmount the current dilemma, there is a need to adopt a new and creative approach and we must find it.
Finally, in ‘The Cayman Islands in Transition’, I wrote that ‘the success of the Cayman Islands’ economy is based upon the symbiotic and synergistic energies of the expatriate and the generational Caymanians’. I warn that if economic or any other kind of inequality is allowed to take root, the economy will fail.
James Arthur Roy Bodden
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