Jamaican politics
Payne, Douglas W.
BEFORE THE Jamaican elections last December I visited Clive Dobson, president of the National Workers Union (NWU), at the union's modest, two-story office amid the Victorian decay of downtown...
...Earlier I had walked down along the harbor, through the assembly-for-export zone es24 DISSENT / Summer 1998 tablished in the 1980s by the government of Edward Seaga, Manley's longtime nemesis and darling of the Reagan administration...
...But that's just camouflage...
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...I asked him why he thought Manley had suddenly deregulated the economy in the early 1990s...
...But for many Jamaicans the alternative evidently looked worse...
...Before the PNP's post-victory press conference at the luxurious Pegasus Hotel uptown, I ran across George Lee, who was Michael Manley's press secretary during the late 1970s...
...He noted that the PNP had maintained a strong tradition of internal democracy, which is true, and concluded by saying that the PNP's vision of the future could be found in the party manifesto...
...A lot of people think the PNP has become a right-wing party," he said, "and many of the youth don't see any hope in either party...
...In 1989, after nine years of what the Reagan administration called Seaga's "economic miracle," Jamaica had the highest per capita foreign debt in the Western hemisphere and more than 50 percent of the country's export earnings were needed to service it...
...You have to remember what Eddie left him," he said...
...Dobson said that if the informal sector were taken into account, the figure probably would be closer to 30 percent...
...Looking closely, I saw that it was the face of Michael Manley framed by the slogans "Power for the People" and "The Word Is Love," indicating that the mural had probably been painted during the 1972 campaign...
...He's a decent man, but .....He completed the sentence with a shrug...
...Michael Manley headed this union for nearly twenty years before he was first elected prime minister in 1972...
...Workers are losing their jobs and the way it's done is inhuman," Dobson said...
...Along a wall that faced the park was a faded mural...
...Patterson thought for a long moment before responding...
...It hurt him deeply to see the pain these so-called reforms brought upon the people...
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...0 VER THE last three years dozens of apparel operations have closed, putting thousands out of work...
...Production had been halted a number of times since the government raised the minimum wage to the equivalent of twentytwo dollars a week and, they said, two women had been fired after managers overheard them talking about organizing a union...
...Since 1997 the PNP government has been subsidizing the apparel industry to the tune of 5 percent of operating costs...
...Dobson spoke wistfully about the efforts of Manley and Willy Brandt, the late former German chancellor and president of the Socialist International, to forge a North-South alliance in favor of a more just world economic order...
...His party has remained in power, but the idealism that Manley exuded in everything he did is gone...
...Whatever we have to do to prepare for the new millennium, we must do it with a human face...
...We have globalization on the Nike model and run by the World Trade Organization...
...Patterson, the reserved technocrat who succeeded Manley, secured another term as prime minister...
...In fact, there was no mention of either democratic socialism or social democracy in the PNP's glossy, seventy-two-page election manifesto...
...It's not 'cause he wearin' the big mon's hat...
...I asked what he meant, but before he could answer Dobson leaned across his desk, propped a fist under his goatee and said, "Because in Jamaica there is no longer sufficient deliberation about the subject of democratic socialism...
...Officially, unemployment in Jamaica is now nearing 20 percent...
...For example," he said, "I can tell you not to be goin' to no Tastee place...
...DOUGLAS W. PAYNE is a New York-based writer...
...Democracy didn't win the cold war, capital did," Dobson said...
...Her office granted the permits to the two hundred imported Asian textile workers...
...After Patterson fielded a battery of questions from Jamaican journalists about cabinet appointments, I asked him, "What is Michael Manley's legacy and how will it be manifest in your next administration...
...But there's no more blank check...
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...He said that he DISSENT / Summer 1998 25 had served with Michael Manley from the beginning...
...When I told him National Heroes Park he laughed and said, "Hero day done in this country, mon...
...Seaga still runs the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) as his own private fiefdom, and although he now sounds more like a populist than a conservative, he is even more abrasive and vindictive than he used to be...
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...In the end, though, he could not deliver Jamaicans to the promised land, and historians will be pondering for years his ill-starred attempt to build democratic socialism in the 1970s and his startling shift to market liberalization after Jamaicans returned him to power in 1989...
...On top of the wall the newly privatized Air Jamaica company had erected a billboard, a giant color photograph of a grinning black child in the cockpit of a jet, a white-skinned captain placing his flight cap upon the boy's head...
...Governments don't have the power or the will to do anything about it...
...Even when his People's National Party (PNP) was voted out of office, opinion polls showed that he remained the most popular figure in the country...
...That figure surpassed the number of violent deaths in New York City, which has a population nearly three times that of Jamaica...
...He said the union still supported the PNP...
...I later put the same question to Portia Simpson, whom many in Jamaica see as a potential successor to Patterson as leader of the PNP...
...The world economy is tone deaf—it doesn't listen to anybody," he said...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...Yet that still has not been sufficient to offset cheaper labor and more docile workforces elsewhere...
...THE EDITORS 26 DISSENT / Summer 1998...
...He introduced himself as Wavell, and asked if maybe I would give him a few dollars if he showed me around...
...The factories are all leased, so the companies can pack up their machinery and be gone overnight— without paying the workers...
...A group of women had gathered in front of the locked gates of a Philippine-owned plant that manufactures T-shirts, or ganzi, in the local patois...
...Now the line is economic reform with a human face," Dobson said...
...I know one thing," Lee continued, "and Michael said it often himself...
...You see how that pickney smilin...
...Every head in the room turned in my direction, as if I had spoken in tongues...
...In trying to dissuade one Taiwanese-owned textile outfit from leaving, the government even gave it permission to bring in two hundred of its own Asian workers...
...He asked where I was going...
...It only deals with those who can produce successfully for it...
...Labor rights have never been more threatened...
...He exhorted the workers to bring down the "walls of Jericho," and the workers called him "Joshua...
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...Our priority now is to unite the workers here and throughout the Caribbean...
...But even if your job doesn't disappear off to Mexico or Central America, it's still sweatshop wages...
...Manley resigned as prime minister in 1992 and left politics altogether, his strength sapped by an ongoing battle with cancer...
...Tastee is a chain of meat pattie joints and the day before robbers had sprayed one of the downtown franchises with automatic weapons, killing three people and wounding a number of others...
...The PNP won the elections in December and P.J...
...It's 'cause the big mon goin' to fly him outta this place...
...Upon Manley's death in March 1997, Rex Nettleford, one of Jamaica's most respected thinkers, said, "He gave us a sense of place and a sense of purpose, which is very important for an ex-slave and an ex-colonial people...
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...The young man said, with more than a trace of sarcasm, "How nice to hear about the Socialist International...
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...It's like we've gone back to the days of slavery...
...His son, Michael, lies nearby...
...The PNP may not be doing much for Jamaicans, but a majority are probably more afraid of what Seaga might do to them...
...The park is in the center of Kingston, a desolate oval of scrubby grass, broken fences, and a few shriveled trees...
...BEFORE THE Jamaican elections last December I visited Clive Dobson, president of the National Workers Union (NWU), at the union's modest, two-story office amid the Victorian decay of downtown Kingston...
...They said they were afraid the plant would not reopen...
...A hot wind off the harbor carried aloft the cries of children and canine yelps from the adjacent ghetto...
...Before Michael could do anything else, he had to bring in foreign investment to keep the country from going under...
...I was telling Dobson about the Socialist International council meeting held in New Delhi last year when an aide stepped in to hand him some files...
...That reminded me of something Manley told an interviewer the year before he resigned...
...It seemed quite a feat, considering the rising unemployment, a stagnant economy, deteriorating infrastructure, and a drug- and poverty-fueled crime wave in which more than a thousand people were murdered in 1997...
...Yes," he said, "the PNP still wins elections, but the support is thin...
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...He hopped off the bus with me, nearly losing a sneaker, the one that had no laces...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...
...Old-timers like Dobson still talk of the resounding ninety-seven-day strike against the state television company in 1964, when Manley, a light-skinned son of privilege, led marches and mass lie-downs at the company headquarters...
...I think that, as much as the cancer, made him decide to step down...
...As prime minister, Manley enacted minimumwage laws, compulsory recognition of labor unions, maternity leave for women, and equal status under the law for children born to unwed parents...
...Since then, it's been P.J.'s show...
...But few would dispute that throughout his life Manley inspired a feeling of self-worth in a people who had been trampled by history...
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...The day before I left Jamaica, I squeezed into one of Kingston's rattletrap jitney buses next to a gaunt, ebony-skinned young man wearing tight-fitting rectangular sunglasses...
...Wave11 said...
...A concrete monument has begun to crumble above the tomb of Norman Manley, the founder of the PNP...
...On his dying bed, Michael Manley gave me the charge to keep working on behalf of the poor and the oppressed," she said...
...He noted that voter abstention rates have climbed to a third or more this decade...
Vol. 45 • July 1998 • No. 3
