Governance, Social Protection and Employment in CARICOM: Is Labour Missing?

• Author: Orville Taylor
• Pages: 439-453

Governance, Social Protection and Employment 439

the three themes of this paper, governance, globalisation and the matter of

labour may appear to be cutting edge given the fact that they have been

critical issues on the regional and international agenda since the middle of the

previous decade. Yet all of these topics have been on the stage of international

discourse before any of the present nations of the Caribbean Community and

Common Market (CARICOM) existed as independent states. The first,

governance is perhaps the most pressing since it has to do with the capacity of

a political entity to determine its destiny. As most other concepts in the social

sciences it is often ill-defined. Nonetheless, a working definition could be that

of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (2002). It describes it as

“. . . the process whereby elements in society wield power and authority, and

influence and enact policies and decisions concerning public life and economic

and social development.” (IIAS:2002). Critical for governance is how political

leaders take decisions which are in the best interest of the majority of its citizenry.

It is both a local and Caribbean issue, and in the context of the contemporary

environment, the question must concern how networks of regional authority

and responsibility serve the residents within its confines. As it is today,

governance was one of the first challenges to be faced by the emerging nations

from the end of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1960s. As independence of the

Caribbean states became imminent, the West Indies Federation became a pivotal

issue. Well fabled by now, it does not need further elucidation. The ill-advised

seceding of Jamaica, and the now cliched ‘One from ten leaves Zero’ was the

first serious challenge for nationhood, demonstrating a parochialism that is all

too difficult to cure.

Federation was to have meant a conglomeration of nations, united in a

relatively seamless political and economic union. This would conceivably imply

free movement of capital and other material resources, the concomitant intra-

regional mobility of labour and a more or less common government. For the

then Jamaican administration, ironically then led by the supposed father of that

nation’s labour movement, federation meant the relinquishment of local

GovernanCe, SoCial ProteCtion

and eMPloyMent in CariCoM:

iS labour MiSSinG?

ORVILLE TAYLOR

CHAPTER TWENTY-tHREE