Today's CARIFORUM meeting between the Bahamas Chamber of Commerce and Employers Confederation (BCCEC) and local workers' organizations offers a unique "sounding board" for the country's labor organizations to take advantage of regional expertise in meeting its obligations under an economic partnership agreement (EPA) between the European Union and CARIFORUM states. BCCEC CEO Edison Sumner yesterday said the meeting, facilitated by the International Labour Organization (ILO), offered a new avenue of finding the most amicable way of addressing future industrial disputes while improving the strength of local organizations to assist in easing the tensions that may arise within the labor force. "The whole idea is to be able to build and strengthen the capacity of the Chamber of Commerce as the only employer representative in The Bahamas by working with the Caribbean labor unions to strengthen the relationship between the employers and the employee representatives," he said.
The meeting, also backed by the Caribbean Employers' Confederation (CEC) and the Caribbean Congress of Labour (CCL), represents the first step in a series of industrial activities to be undertaken by The Bahamas and 14 other regional countries participating in the program. "It gives us all a sounding board and gives us points of reference so that if we are facing any issues in this country we are able to reach out to our counterparts throughout the region to see how they would have dealt with similar issues in their jurisdictions, and establish essentially some standard set of rules and guidelines that all of us can work by," Sumner said.
While acknowledging the unique challenges facing each CARIFORUM jurisdiction, Sumner said that a standardized set of industrial rules or guidelines arising from the regional exercise would increase the ease of doing business and make collaborations across borders in the region far smoother. In particular, the program could provide vital assistance in promoting cross-border training to close The Bahamas' skills gap. "When we're looking at how these initiatives can help The Bahamas, we mainly talk about the area of skills development, which has long been a concern of ours. These kinds of programs will help us build up our skills sets and a part of what we indicated in our meeting that we attended in Barbados a few months ago... was that we would like to see opportunities for Bahamians to matriculate and get vocational or academic training in institutions throughout the region," said Sumner.
"If you think about regional discussions, our colleagues in the region will be thinking also about regional integration as well as part of the EPA discussion or the WTO accession discussions. With The Bahamas being essentially the only country holding out on becoming full members of some of these organizations, I'm sure that they will form part of the discussions moving forward, as well."
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