For­mer ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion min­is­ter Fazal Karim has con­demned the Gov­ern­ment for mis­lead­ing young peo­ple on the num­ber of spaces to be cre­at­ed in the On-The-Job Pro­gramme (OJT). He claimed that the 8,000 pro­jec­tion was nev­er at­tain­able and was noth­ing short of a ruse.

Ad­dress­ing the Stand­ing Fi­nance Com­mit­tee last week, Labour Min­is­ter Jen­nifer Bap­tiste-Primus was un­able to state just how many new OJT ap­pli­cants would be placed, us­ing the $21.4 mil­lion sup­ple­men­tary al­lo­ca­tions in fis­cal 2020.

Karim al­so crit­i­cised Bap­tiste-Primus for be­ing un­able to give the pro­ject­ed num­ber of OJTs to be re­cruit­ed for To­ba­go where 259 trainees are cur­rent­ly ac­cess­ing the pro­gramme.

He said, "The Min­is­ter of Labour in­formed the com­mit­tee that 5,013 OJTs are ac­cess­ing the pro­gramme of which just un­der 100 trainees were placed in the pri­vate sec­tor."

Karim said that the wage bill for 5,000 OJTs works out to an es­ti­mat­ed $27 mil­lion per month or $270 mil­lion for ten months alone, in­clu­sive of the ten per cent OJT in­crease ef­fec­tive from De­cem­ber 1, 2019.

He ex­plained, how­ev­er, that the Gov­ern­ment had bud­get­ed $284 mil­lion for OJTs at the be­gin­ning of the year and there was no math­e­mat­i­cal sce­nario un­der which 8,000 OJTs could ever be placed on the OJT pro­gramme.

Karim al­so said that the 100 OJTs placed in the pri­vate sec­tor was a shock­ing rev­e­la­tion and was a re­flec­tion of the shame­ful mis­man­age­ment of the OJT pro­gramme.

He said when the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment demit­ted of­fice in 2015, pri­vate sec­tor place­ment ex­ceed­ed 1,000 OJTs and the col­lapse in the num­bers sug­gest­ed that the pri­vate sec­tor had lost con­fi­dence in the pro­gramme.

"The Min­is­ter of Labour in­formed the Stand­ing Fi­nance Com­mit­tee that $350,000 was owed to pri­vate em­ploy­ers on the OJT pro­gramme and that af­ter five years the re­im­burse­ment process to pri­vate em­ploy­ers had not im­proved."

The for­mer min­is­ter al­so said that the Row­ley-led gov­ern­ment had sup­pressed OJT place­ments since 2015 and now in an elec­tion year, they were at­tempt­ing to hood­wink young peo­ple in the same un­eth­i­cal man­ner that the Gov­ern­ment was hop­ing to do by pay­ing teach­ers a stipend to pre­pare stu­dents for the SEA ex­am dur­ing the Ju­ly/Au­gust pe­ri­od. Karim said, "Our young peo­ple are bril­liant, prin­ci­pled and not naïve. Our young peo­ple can­not be bought with a ten per cent stipend in­crease. The Gov­ern­ment must tell the coun­try what are the plans for sus­tain­able jobs for our young peo­ple in­stead of elec­tion­eer­ing gim­micks."