Orville Taylor | The award is for people like you

“Your future is connected to the West end.” This is the one thing on which my apocryphal high school principal and I agreed.

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, to the Greater Glory of God. The West End is the poor and less powerful; people on the margins, victimised, stigmatised.

The working poor, that majority of Jamaicans, descended from African captives and Indians, tricked into human trafficking.

Miss Ivy and Elder Taylor instilled the value of education. We shared our ‘little much’, because, since Compound and Chalice City/Brooke Valley days, there were always some who had a little less than us. Mama took a minimum wage factory job, daily walking in the dark from the foothills of Duhaney Park to Molynes Road, to save two cents on her bus fare. She deserves this national honour more than me.

Formative lessons from my parents and teachers. Gramps Morgan sings it perfectly, “give a little more than you take, fix a little more than you break”. Importantly, “stand up for those on ... their knees” and “lend a voice to those who cannot speak.”

No focus on the place; just be, “people like you”.

This award is for my people of Kingston 11, St Patrick’s Primary, who decided to name Taylor house after a living man not yet 40. It is yellow; not black. Too many teachers to single out, but Mrs Gregg, Miss Anderson and Mr Noble were critical. Gratitude!

Tar Baby Taylor shares this with his Georgian knights.

Jean and Ouida, two Paralympians, who worked with the Ministry of Construction, helped me to demystify persons with disabilities. Gloria, allowed me to sit with her while she ate, Paul, blind but always alert.

A tutor with no formal training, and zero provision by the University, Wilbert Williams and Hixwell Douglas prepared me for myriad blind students, like Floyd Morris and many others. Advocacy and sensitivity for persons with disabilities became second nature. Permitting me to lend my voice to your cause for four decades is a privilege.

Stanley Vernon, introduced me to pan-Africanism in the middle 1970s. African studies club in high school to Africanist scholarship and life membership in the (American) Association of Black Sociologists; the Man in Black, 365 days. This is for the ‘Blacktivists’ and the Jamaicans who suffered in the post-colonial period, shared with the Rastafari, who kept focus on the Africanity of Jamaicans and helped to shape our identity. This man with a bald head is never a ‘Bald Head’. Jah liveth every time.

In 1985, Sergeant Jevene Bent turned up at the Ministry of Labour, seeking help with her industrial relations course. A few years later, Novelette Grant, along with a bunch of other public servants, were my guinea pigs in Mandeville and Claire Spence’s experiment led to what is MIND today. Later, Grant, Bent and Mary Royes Henry, all former students, arrested me and initiated a three-decade relationship in multiple capacities, giving me the privilege to be the chairman of the police college, historically registering it with the UCJ. To troops of the Constabulary, including the former ISCF, but especially those treated unkindly; this is for you too.

Media gave me a platform and voice; from being the founding chairman of the PBCJ to 21 years as columnist and talk show host in the RJRGLEANER group.

And yes, the Ministry of Labour and Social Security (MLSS). Having spent three years at the Ministry of Construction, someone had the presence of mind to send me to there, into the hands of Anthony Irons.

Undoubtedly, the MLSS not only gave me a body of knowledge, which allowed me to ‘eat food’, but most importantly, it brought me closer to the working class, the working poor and trade union movement, as the Ministry sought to keep a balance between well-organised employers on the one hand and the small quintile of unionised workers. But more significant, the vulnerable, not covered by collective labour agreements and those others for whom the Ministry had to extend the social safety net. Some 40 years later, and 28 since finally severing my relationship with the Ministry, it is tearfully pleasant to see fingerprints, which endure today. After all, how many have been given the wonderful opportunity to serve the entire labour scenario by making major contribution to research, policy, law, practice, and the uplift of staff in the Ministry and trade unionists?

To those persons, some of whom are still at the Ministry who were inspired or encouraged by some of the things they either asked me or supported me in doing; this is for you too.

Inspired by a cadre of academics, epitomised by the great Barry Chevannes, The Lord blessed me in being axiomatic in the University’s own labour studies initiative. Three programmes are my direct contributions. Still, it is the basic mantra from day one, which inspired the book Broken Promises Hearts and Pockets a Century of Betrayal of the Jamaican Working Class, awarded by the University as best publication in 2016. It is now soaking in that one of my three positive professorial reviewers considered it and my body of work to be “a particularly worthwhile field of expertise and scholarly involvement for an eminent institution such as the University of the West Indies.” Thank you UWI.

A small compensation for the pain my family feel when the eagles and hawks surround me; they are beloved little rock.

Serving my nation and fighting for the weak, has been an honour and vocation.

And to those; who break more than they fix and trample those on their knees; there is a place, somewhere, for people like you too.

Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com