Ugly blemishes on T&T’s shiny face
Some unattractive blemishes disfigured the shiny face of energy-booming Trinidad and Tobago last week.
At the Hilton Trinidad, blue-chip participants in the South Chamber’s petroleum conference revelled in T&T economic achievements based on gas and oil, and savoured the prospects for still further energy-industry development.
Proceedings at that same conference, however, were brought sharply to earth in an address by Labour Minister Danny Montano. In a blunt presentation of other T&T realities, the minister cited figures showing the widening disparities in income distribution.
Mr Montano did not break any big story. Trends showing the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and those in-between fast becoming a vanishing class have made headlines in this country again and again.
Luxury vehicles
Superfine construction going up, luxury vehicles choking the roads, and conspicuous consumption both by private individuals and by the State are the stuff of trite observation. That all these coexist alongside resilient poverty, degraded infrastructure and services, homelessness and hopelessness is also so familiar as to be often overlooked.
Commendably, the labour minister put some unpalatable facts on the Hilton table. Delegates might otherwise have gone away thinking the ship of the T&T State serenely on course to a destination called Developed Status, without being threatened by brewing storms of social discontent.
Mr Montano did not go as far as observers who argue that unequal income distribution not only encourages crime but even motivates the ferocious violence that increasingly typifies some crimes.
Instead, he supplied official figures from which sobering conclusions might be drawn, especially in light of the Government’s usual boast of full or nearly full employment and reduced income taxes.
In 2005, the labour minister said, 48 per cent of all workers earned less than $3,000 a month, and 28 per cent made less than $2,000 a month.
To put those figures in a meaningful context, he quoted the Consumer Affairs Division’s estimate that, to eat nutritionally-balanced meals, a family of four needs $1,700 a month.
Assuming a best case in which two people in the household are employed, for nearly half of all workers, food shopping takes up almost one-third of their income. For the 28 per cent earning less than $2,000 a month, to eat proper meals and meet other living expenses must present a challenge unimaginable to more well-to-do people.
Corrective action
Mr Montano also provided some insight into how the minimum wage and the Government’s prized Cepep job schemes affect the targeted people at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.
“Someone on minimum wage cannot support a family,” he said. “A Cepep worker earns $75 a day or approximately $1,500 a month. He cannot support a family.”
The minimum wage must be the labour minister’s responsibility.
But his disclosures on Tuesday give rise to questions about the extent to which his Cabinet colleagues are themselves also informed, and focussed on corrective action.
Another eye-opener about T&T’s realities last week was the eviction by the Housing Development Corporation of 15 families from public housing at Cocorite, Barataria, Maloney and San Fernando.
The HDC said the evictions were the result of five to ten years of unpaid rent, which cannot be condoned. But the corporation should clarify its own culpability in allowing arrears to pile up so high for so long.
For the tenants evicted, amid bitter protests, and the usual police show of force, were evidently low-income people, single parents, and even welfare recipients. Unemployed people, small children and meagre belongings were literally being flung out on the street by a state agency avowedly carrying out government policy.
Such an exposure of an ugly reality of T&T today—a ruthless use of State power against least-privileged citizens—should disturb all but the most complacent and self-righteous.
©2005-2006 Trinidad Publishing Company Limited
Designed by: Randall Rajkumar-Maharaj · Updated daily by: Nicholas Attai
