The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The Chamber of Commerce’s top workforce specialist yesterday said he plans to discuss “some good ideas” for solving the government’s understudy issues when he meets its labour chief next month.

Peter Goudie told Tribune Business he wanted to create “dialogue” with John Pinder, the director of labour, on ways to resolve the training of Bahamians to take over from expatriate workers through the transfer of knowledge and skills.

The initiative was given further impetus by the prime minister’s closing mid-year budget address on Monday, during which he suggested that expatriate workers who failed to adequately train Bahamian understudies to replace them before their permits expire should be replaced by new foreign workers to prevent them establishing long-term roots in this nation.

“I’m having a meeting with John Pinder soon about all this and some ideas I have,” Mr Goudie said. “I want to have a dialogue with him. We need to talk about this stuff. There are other ways to do things. One opinion is not necessarily the right one, which is why I want to have dialogue with the director of labour. The minister [Dion Foulkes] knows I’m going to talk to John.

“I think we’ve got some good ideas about how to solve the issue of understudies. I have some ideas and I think they’ll like them. It’s something that I think is more palatable and achievable.”

Mr Goudie said his meeting with Mr Pinder, which is scheduled for the second week in March, comes after the understudy issue was discussed at the last meeting of the National Tripartite Council, the joint private sector-union-government body that deals with all labour-related matters in The Bahamas.

The Chamber’s labour head declined to detail what he plans to discuss with Mr Pinder, but in a previous Tribune Business interview said he had been working up ideas centred around Bahamians going to other countries to train.

“I found when I was the head of human resources for a major regional bank that Bahamians are very reluctant to move overseas, and that is how you really get expertise; not just by understudying someone,” he told Tribune Business. “We need to go forth into the world to learn. That’s how a lot of expatriates who are here got their expertise, and Bahamians are reluctant to do that.

“We’ve put together a proposal where the understudy needs to go to other countries to gain experience. It took me years and years to get the experience I did when I headed up human resources for the region. You’re going to give me someone in three years’ time who has my experience? It’s not going to work.

“We’re going to propose a plan to get Bahamians to go overseas and gain that type of experience, and then come back and take over. That’s the gist of it. It’s much deeper than that. But you can’t just learn from somebody; you have to experience that yourself, and you can’t get that by staying home”

Mr Pinder has previously said that work permit approvals will be directly linked to the employer identifying a Bahamian understudy and putting in place an appropriate training programme to enable them to replace the expatriate hire.

It has always been the policy that Bahamian employers needed to name an “understudy” to take over from an expatriate hire when applying for a work permit, but this has never been fully enforced as the Government simply lacked the necessary manpower to do so.

However, the initiative was given fresh impetus this week by Dr Hubert Minnis who hit out at expatriate work permit holders who failed to train Bahamians to replace them, yet remained in this nation for years, taking jobs away from locals. He said employers would have to bring in fresh expatriate hires if work permit holders failed to train Bahamian replacements by the time their visa expires.

The Prime Minister blasted: “I find it very difficult, and I could not understand and still don’t understand to-date, where investors, bankers etc bring individuals to our shores on contracts for three or four years with commitment that they would train Bahamians to take over such jobs.

“In six years they are still here, eight years they are still here, and in nine years they are applying for residency, displacing Bahamians. I find it difficult that my nationals cannot obtain the knowledge to take over the job. Since I know that nationals can, and do, have the knowledge to take over the job, the fault must be with the trainer.

“We ought to aggressively ensure that succession planning is first and foremost and, in the absence of the individuals not properly being trained, that trainer has failed and must be replaced by a new trainer so that they do not establish foundation within our country and further take jobs away from our citizens.”