One of the things I did not know about the history of employment in TT is that 24 years before emancipation, the UK government outlawed the transatlantic commerce in slavery.
This was a factor in the diminishing of profits from the owning and exploitation of slaves in the Caribbean. Plantation owners simply could no longer buy or import slaves to work for them.
After emancipation, the wages to be paid to male and female workers, “the freed slaves,” were decided throughout the empire by the UK colonial office, and the rate for males was established as being higher than that for females.
That discrepancy has remained standard over subsequent generations. Even when TT ratified the idle convention on establishing equal pay for work of equal value and legislation supported it, the distinction between remuneration for genders remained.
The reality in small, start-up businesses is that labour laws are skipped over, and no one notices because no one checks.
The characteristic of emancipation that draws most attention, recently, is the matter of reparation that provided financial support for slave owners, rather than the people who were enslaved.
According to a report recently published in the UK, it appears that the money paid to the “property owners” was then used by most of them for investment into another trade or to pay off debts, which had accrued because of the loss of profits. The reparation sums given to slave owners, whether they be individuals or companies (mainly from the UK, but not exclusively) were substantial and provided the basis of the commercial economies that are still with us up to today. Only one per cent of individuals were actually eligible for reparation. The high numbers of those who faced bankruptcy because they no longer had the income earned from the work of slaves in their reparation grant were able to pay off their bank loans. And as usual, the banks profited most.
[caption id="attachment_1007128" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Women members of the Public Services Association march in Scarborough during Labour Day, June 19, 2022. - File photo[/caption]
A query came in last week on the basis of which the Equal Opportunity Commission was founded, when it came to the matter of gender remuneration: is there a law or policy that allows salaries or wages paid to men to be rated higher than those paid to women? Because in many family-run, or small business enterprises, higher wages are being paid to men than to women for doing the same job, or jobs which have the same face value.
The International Labour Organization's Equal Remuneration Convention (No 100), which is generally accepted as the gold standard in this regard, has been ratified by TT and put into national policy. It states that rates of remuneration (“the ordinary, basic or minimum wage or salary and any additional emoluments whatsoever payable directly or indirectly, whether in cash or in kind, by the employer to the worker”) must be established without discrimina
