Nadaleen Singh

T&T is go­ing in a deep re­ces­sion from which it is not like­ly to re­cov­er un­til 2018. That was the eco­nom­ic fore­cast made by Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance Mar­i­ano Browne when he ad­dressed a break­fast sem­i­nar host­ed by the Hu­man Re­source Man­age­ment As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (HRMATT) and the Trinidad Hilton and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre.

Browne urged par­tic­i­pants at the sem­i­nar, which had as its theme, Find­ing So­lu­tions to T&T's Chron­ic Poor Work Eth­ic Cul­ture, not to waste the op­por­tu­ni­ties pre­sent­ed by a re­ces­sion­ary pe­ri­od. "Whether it has been de­fined or not, we are in a re­ces­sion. It is go­ing to be a deep one," he said.

The for­mer min­is­ter said en­er­gy prices, which have been de­clin­ing over an ex­tend­ed pe­ri­od, will "re­cov­er some­where around 2018/2019, that's two to three years from now" and when that re­cov­ery hap­pens it would be at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50 per cent of where prices were in mid-2014 when the de­cline start­ed.

"We are talk­ing about a lev­el of prices in the in­ter­na­tion­al econ­o­my of US$50 and US$60–maybe even trend­ing to­ward US$70 to­ward 2020, which is still 35 per cent off from the high that we are ac­cus­tomed to and what we have lived on for the last five years. The re­al­i­ty is that we are in a cri­sis," Browne said.

He said T&T is in a cri­sis in terms of ag­gre­gate de­mand.

"Ag­gre­gate de­mand is go­ing to fall. There are ad­just­ments that have to be made all across the or­gan­i­sa­tions, so there is a sense of ur­gency be­cause it is al­so go­ing to af­fect oil com­pa­nies. Are they go­ing to sur­vive which ones will?" he asked.

Browne said the most ef­fi­cient com­pa­nies that of­fer prod­ucts which are high in de­mand will be the ones to sur­vive the re­ces­sion, along with those which are "best man­aged". "The dif­fer­ence be­tween suc­cess and fail­ure is not on­ly the prod­uct it­self but the qual­i­ty of the man­age­ment. We have to es­tab­lish a sense of ur­gency, we have to de­vel­op a coali­tion be­cause it is a dy­nam­ic process be­tween us and the peo­ple who work with us." He told HRMATT mem­bers at the sem­i­nar to de­vel­op a strat­e­gy, com­mu­ni­cate it, em­pow­er ac­tion, bring ac­tion.

Gail Mer­hair, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of GM Ad­ver­tis­ing Lim­it­ed, said al­though a lot of mon­ey has been spent to ed­u­cate young peo­ple at the ter­tiary lev­el the qual­i­ty of work­ers en­ter­ing the work­force is poor as some of them can't write a let­ter, or even spell prop­er­ly. She added that the dress code for work is de­plorable as well.

Mer­hair said there are too many make work pro­grammes pro­vid­ing long-term em­ploy­ment when that type of em­ploy­ment is sup­posed to be short-term. Al­so speak­ing at the sem­i­nar was Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) Eco­nom­ics lec­tur­er Dr Roger Ho­sein who pre­dict­ed that sev­er­al changes will be made in gov­ern­ment's up­com­ing mid-year re­view.