Generate wealth

December 14, 2002
By Bukka Rennie

What to tell civil servants? Much has been said about the $600 million that will be shared amongst them. It is really back-pay. Payment in exchange for work that has already been proffered years ago. Income that was either removed or retained by the State illegally.

I have been saying for years that "front-pay" better than "back-pay". When I worked for trade unions that was always my advice. If there is no "contract" in place, do not work.

Management officials should be made to understand that once the duration of the three-year contract comes to an end, another should be begin from the very next day, or there will be no work.

But in this country we have come to accept this back-pay syndrome and we actually organise to effect retroactive payment, glad to have the big sums in hand.

But these sums are always taxed by government at the highest rate (35 per cent) and most times workers are so indebted that the money flows to their creditors.

Workers end up losing.

I am certain that of this $600 million, almost $300 million will be retained by the State through direct and indirect tax measures. But we seem to like it so.

If these monies had not been taken away by the State or retained by the State, public servants would have been in a much better financial position today, managing and utilising their measured increments and pay raises wisely over time.

But today, public servants will have in hand big sums. My advice: don't pay debts, unless it is a matter of "life or death". Invest the money, find something that will generate further income and pay debts from new income sources.

We have to learn the process of generation. To do this we may have to transform a whole cultural perspective.

I have said before in this same space:

"...We did not grow up in a world in which people prayed for money and wealth. In the culture we knew, people prayed for health, strength, knowledge and wisdom... 'riches' and 'righteousness' were made to seem by nature contradictory.

"Profits, by extension of the same logic, seemed vulgar, negative and probably even unworthy of our best endeavours and creative energies...

"In our time, and in our cultural world, most youth found themselves programmed to be teachers, clerks or clergymen.

"In fact there is truth in the view that the grammar schools were designed to produce a society of clerks who were programmed not to challenge anything but to accept the status quo and rubber stamp existing arrangements...

"Salary is the biggest discipliner of human beings. If you are forever tied to a salary, you most likely would amount to nothing.

"Salary is about keeping you alive to come back and work for another day.

"Salary is sustenance, not generation, unless you are getting the kind of salaries and perks that the big-boy professionals are getting today.

"When we left secondary school, we were told by concerned parents that we should apply for a job in the public service, because such jobs are 'pensionable', take out life insurance and open a savings account.

"Imagine outlining such a strategy for future existence for a youth of 18. It was tantamount to assigning a life of penury to our best and most energetic minds.

"We were inadvertently relegating ourselves to a legacy of poverty that has worsened to a most devastating extent in the late 1990s...

"No one said buy a piece of land, buy a truck, buy and sell anything that is in constant demand, in order to generate wealth.

"It is the economic independence and economic security that one gains from such activity that allows one to finance later on the education and development of future offspring. If not, the only legacy is border-line poverty.

"The very small percentage of us who broke with that tradition and dared to establish a different path, embracing the parameters of business and wealth accumulation, were ignored and left to flounder without any rooted support mechanism or network... Not so with other people in this land.

"...Wealth to other people is a blessing, the very essence of their existence, while in our world we were taught that the poor are blessed and will see God. Our grannies were even wont to say in patois 'black bird never pray for pretty feather, he pray for long life...'"

We demand that public servants today break that cycle. Invest, invest, invest, now!