The National Tripartite Council has been given the mandate to work on a liveable wage.
Chairman Sharon Martin says before this work can begin information must be gathered. “Labour Force Survey is what I’m referring to. That has just been launched, so that needs to happen for us because we need to know how many unemployed persons are there, how many discouraged workers are there. Of course, you know a discouraged worker is a person who doesn’t feel that they want to work. And so we need to fine tune that, the only way we can get that data is through the Bahamas National Statistics Institute (BNSI). So we’re kind of in the information gathering session right now and when we’re completed with that we will be able to now make a determination of how and what we will do,” Martin said.
Martin went on to give details of The Bahamas attending the International Labour Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. “We go to Geneva in June and with one hundred and eighty five countries at some point we sit down because that is the Labour Parliament. We sit down and we begin to carve, like we do with the National Apprenticeship Program, where all one eighty five countries have a clear definition of what an apprentice is, what apprenticeship is as well. So we want that same things for a liveable wage. You can’t have this country saying that’s what a liveable wage is and then this other country says that what…so we all need to get together, so its just not The Bahamas.”
