Editorial | Going radical on productivity

In the normal course of events, the decision by Gary ‘Butch’ Hendrickson to step down as CEO of the family-owned National Baking Company and hand its leadership to his son, Craig, is a significant business development for Jamaica.

The elder Mr Hendrickson, who took control of National from his father Karl in 1995, as part of a major reorganisation of the family enterprise, is one of Jamaica’s most successful businessmen, and National is among the island’s largest and most innovative manufacturing, processing, and distribution companies. The company employs more than 800 people. It is building a state-of-the-art bakery in Montego Bay.

Beyond his accomplishments on behalf of his company, Butch Hendrickson has another important characteristic that makes his ‘retirement’, at this time, especially noteworthy. He thinks deeply about national development, including policies necessary to achieve sustainable economic growth. Importantly, too, Mr Hendrickson put his personal time, and his company’s resources, behind initiatives to help small enterprises establish themselves and grow, notwithstanding the possibility that they could emerge as competitors.

He may not have articulated the issue in precisely those terms, but Butch Hendrickson’s fundamental concern was one consistently raised by this newspaper: how to enhance productivity in the context of a national industrial policy. Indeed, this is an issue addressed in separate articles on Sunday in this newspaper by social anthropologist and public intellectual Don Robotham and economist and principal of the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus, Densil Williams.

Last week, economist Keenan Falconer and public policy researcher Aubrey Stewart tangentially addressed the same question in a joint article that questioned the sustainability of the rising cost of public sector wages as a percentage of GDP. While this was not their primary intent or analysis, Messrs Falconer and Stewart used the public sector wage-to-GDP ratio as a loose proxy for national productivity, which is a serious issue for Jamaica, where, in the more than half a century since 1972, total factor productivity declined 37 per cent, or at an annual average of 0.7 per cent.

TYPE OF EDUCATION

Professors Robotham and Williams’ focus was on education, or rather the type of education and training that is required to free Jamaica from an old economic trap characterised by low productivity, low value-added, low growth, and low wages. And this is the case despite nearly a decade and a half of macroeconomic stability and, in recent years, historic low unemployment of just above three per cent.

The Robotham-Williams paradigm is for a sharp educational pivot to the sciences and technology if Jamaica hopes to compete in an aggressive, no-holds-barred global marketplace where competence in technological innovation and the ability to think creatively are crucial.

“The surest way to kick-start the modernisation agenda in the Caribbean space is to reform our education system,” Professor Williams wrote. “The education curriculum is foundational for facilitating new ways of thinking and for survival in the modern global economy. The curriculum must facilitate rigorous thinking and analysis over romantic and sentimental scholarship. It must support creativity, the arts, and critical thinking. It must make mathematics and science education mandatory. It must celebrate science over rhetoric and polemic … .”

In Jamaica’s case, Professor Robotham argues for a push to produce more skilled specialists in the sciences rather than generalists of the STEAM education concept. But notable is his radical proposal for financing this thrust: the reallocation to education of money from the Government’s infrastructure projects such as the SPARK road rehabilitation programme.

In making his case, Professor Robotham invoked Butch Hendrickson and a project at UWI, Mona, Building Out Our STEM Teachers (BOOST), to which National Baking committed nearly J$160 million over a six-year period. It is also backed by the Digicel and NCB Foundations, the Orane family, and the American Friends of Jamaica. Under the scheme, final-year students in the sciences who commit to teach in Jamaican schools get their student loans repaid, relative to the number of years they stay in the classroom. However, the project can facilitate relatively few students.

ALLOCATED TO BOOST

Professor Robotham suggested that J$10 billion could be pinched from SPARK’s J$45 billion budget and allocated to BOOST.

Said Professor Robotham: “Imagine for a moment what would happen if J$10 billion was injected into this programme. With this level of funding, we could significantly increase the recruitment of specialist science students at the UWI, Mona. Over time, we could increase the annual number of specialist maths/physics/chemistry/biochemistry teachers to 50 or more per year.

“The result would be a transformation of our education system. Our labour force would become one composed of knowledge workers on the Asian model. Such a change goes way beyond the present vision of better skills training and TVET. The social and cultural impact of a change of this magnitude would be of inestimable benefit to Jamaican society for many generations to come.

“This is the real path to economic transformation, and it is perfectly feasible, budgetarily speaking.”

These arguments are, on their face, compelling and worthy of serious debate. What, however, is not addressed is the crisis of literacy at the primary-education level and whether that foundational element of the system is getting the aggressive attention it deserves.

On both fronts, the matter is urgent. Dr Andrew Holness must take these issues on board in delivering his government’s promised strategy to boost national productivity.