THE LONG 'FREE MOVEMENT' WAIT
By RICKEY SINGH
Guyana Chronicle
July 6, 2003
MONTEGO BAY - Caribbean Community leaders were expected to be in a position last evening, after a week of summitry politics in Ocho Rios and Montego Bay, to make some significant announcements on a range of matters, one of which I have chosen to address today - free movement of people.
It is one of the vexed people-focused issues that remains enmeshed in a lot of rhetoric and with no clear solution in sight, 30 years after the birth of CARICOM.
For all the reassuring public statements by some Community leaders, as well as the contrasting negative posturings of those opposed to the free movement of people, NO right is guaranteed by the CARICOM Treaty for nationals to live and/or work anywhere in the region.
As a Caribbean journalist, I have been amazed at how even well-intentioned Community leaders and officials often seek to confuse arrangements by governments to "facilitate" comparatively small categories of "skilled" nationals to freely "seek" to live and work in any CARICOM state, as if they are indeed promoting a "right" to free movement.
Recent parliamentary debates in Trinidad and Tobago, for instance, on enabling legislation to facilitate intra-regional movement of skilled personnel have served to underscore the divisions and misconceptions that prevail.
It is a fundamental issue for involvement of the great mass of CARICOM nationals to have a "lived" experience in the promised single economic space that is emerging as the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME). It has been a long wait for a bold and imaginative collective decision to make a reality of freedom of movement for all.
The major regional social partners of the CARICOM governments, and in particular the Caribbean Congress of Labour (CCL) and the Caribbean Policy Development Centre (CPDC), have been continuing their own lobbying in support of free movement of Community nationals.
What was quite new and, encouraging at the just-concluded CARICOM Summit, was the circulation of a researched document by the CPDC, the umbrella body grouping non-governmental organisations across the region.
Vital Link
The document deals with the free movement of people issue with an enlightenment and passion, unburdened by so much of the tedious official jargon that comes with submissions for meetings of the Community's leaders.
The CPDC paper, authored, I understand, by a young and respected academic of the University of the West Indies, has pointed to free movement as the vital link between the people of the Caribbean and the CSME.
A comparison has been made of how Europe, in establishing a single market en route to an economic union, enshrined very early in its arrangements the concept of the broad category of "wage earners" having the "right" to move freely across borders.
In contrast, here in CARICOM, we are still debating whether we should "facilitate" limited categories of "skilled" nationals to have the right to "seek work".
In the slow, frustrating process to "facilitate" nationals to "seek" employment - with no guaranteed "right" to work any where in the Community - the governments are, perhaps unconsciously, fostering divisions among the region's skilled and unskilled work force.
And, by extension, they are breeding more cynicism and disenchantment among the masses about official efforts for "free movement and competitiveness" in the promised single economic space (CSME).
What is particularly revealing in the CPDC's submission, is that contrary to the perception held by decision-makers who are fearful of a backlash from domestic constituencies they think are opposed to free movement of people, researchers of the UWI have come up with conclusions that reveal significant positive responses, in various countries, in support of the "right" to live and work within the Community.
As the CPDC's paper points out, the timidity of the Community's political directorate to make free movement of people a reality, may very well be related to their uncertainty over the extent to which their own populations are supportive of such an initiative.
Quantitative research suggests that this fear or reservation on the part of the leaders is not reflective of the views of people in a number of Community states. A case study cited, pointed out that at least 50 per cent of persons tested in the Eastern Caribbean states of Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines, were quite supportive of "intensified" integration, while only 14 per cent were opposed.
People’s responses
That study was recently undertaken by UWI Researcher Cynthis Barrow-Giles and published in a paper entitled `Mass Support for Regionalism: Capitalising on a Permissive Climate’.
A general study in Barbados by the Caribbean Development Research Services (CADRES), which regularly conducts public opinion surveys, revealed that one of the most frequently mentioned "disappointments" was the failure to achieve Caribbean political unity.
In its latest 2003 opinion survey, CADRES found that 50 per cent of Barbadians polled felt that the distinction being made to facilitate free movement of "skilled" nationals should be removed in favour of free movement for all categories of workers.
The CPDC's paper contends that "there is considerable support regionally" for enhanced freedom of movement, and that Caribbean governments "either misunderstand, or have not investigated" the extent to which their populations would support the implementation of a policy that guarantees the right of all categories of nationals to freely move and work within the Community.
The region's private sector has not been particularly vocal in its support of the freedom of movement.
It is, therefore, to be hoped that the Caribbean Congress of Labour and the Caribbean Policy Development Centre will seek to vigorously lobby all stakeholders to link support for the CSME to the right for all categories of the region's labour force to live and work in any member state of the Community.
It has not been forgotten by many that during the period of British colonial rule, people were freely travelling across the region, working and living in each other's place of birth. With independence have come plenty of restrictions amid all the swelling rhetoric about "unity of the Caribbean people".