Get the jobs! - Golding administration under pressure to ...

[Lazie]

Get the jobs! - Golding administration under pressure to keep campaign promise
Published: Wednesday | September 2, 2009

Two years after taking the reins of power, the Bruce Golding administration is coming under increasing pressure for its failure to meet its campaign promise of creating hundreds of new jobs.
The latest Gleaner-commissioned Bill Johnson poll found that seven out of 10 Jamaicans are disappointed with Golding and his team for their failure to create jobs and prevent unemployment.
The Johnson poll, conducted in early August among 1,008 respondents, found that only five per cent of Jamaicans strongly approve of the efforts of the Government on the employment front.

Seventeen per cent of the respondents said they approved giving Golding a positive rating of 22 per cent. This is about 11 percentage points below the average level of support from Jamaica Labour Party voters in the polls.
"I expect that the poll will show that most persons are not satisfied with the Government's handling of the job situation, particularly remembering the JLP's pre-election mantra of 'jobs, jobs, jobs'," Lambert Brown, president of the University and Allied Workers' Union, told The Gleaner.
"It would be consistent with data in the polls you have already released which show unemployment as a major concern and would reflect the job cuts which started even before the economic recession.
"No one is safe, from a manager in a major financial institution to a worker at a small entity, plus the seeming victimisation in some government agencies. People are not seeing any investment or any sign that things will change. There are no green shoots or roots of new investments," Brown added.

The latest data from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security show almost 20,000 people losing their jobs since late last year.
The Government has argued that this is not unusual in the present economic crisis, which has seen millions of people losing their jobs worldwide.
"We are not finding jobs in Jamaica, even to meet a good proportion of recent graduates at both university and high-school level ... . Jobs are very hard to come along," Labour Minister Pearnel Charles recently admitted.

Golding has also admitted that job creation should be a major international priority. He used an address to the International Labour Organisation to back a proposed "global job pact".
"Job creation is not an outcome of economic recovery. It is essential to economic recovery. It is the only sustainable way of stimulating the demand for goods and services without which investments will not take place, factories and businesses cannot be revived and the decline in trade will not be reversed," Golding said.

http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/glean...ead/lead1.html

[Lazie]

'Golding can do better' - Jamaicans don't think the PM's administration is doing a good enough job of managing the economy

Arthur Hall, Senior Staff Reporter

Most Jamaicans seem to have accepted that much of the country's present economic problems are being caused by global conditions and not mismanagement by the Bruce Golding administration.
But that does not mean that Jamaicans have absolved present and past administrations.
While nine out of every 10 Jamaicans agree that the country is in the middle of a major economic crisis, there is no consensus on who or what is to blame.

The latest Gleaner-commissioned Bill Johnson poll found that 65 per cent of Jamaicans point to world circumstances for the pickle in which Jamaica finds itself.
However, 24 per cent blame Bruce Golding and his team while 21 per cent point the finger at the People's National Party administration which governed the country for 18 years up to September 2007.
"Fourteen per cent of the people think they are better off now than they were before the last election and almost two-thirds, 64 per cent, say they are worse off. The reasons they feel they are worse off are the rising unemployment and perceptions of increases in the cost of living," Johnson noted.

The pollster also found that Golding and his team were rated behind the PNP when the respondents were asked which of the two major political parties would be better able to deal with the economic crisis.
Better manager?
In the poll conducted on August 8, 9, 14 and 15, Johnson found that most respondents viewed the issue through green- or orange-tinted glasses in responding to the question of which party would be the better manager.
But with a margin of error of plus or minus three per cent, it was a statistical dead heat.

Thirty-six per cent claimed the PNP would be the better captain of the ship of state as Jamaica moves through these turbulent waters, while 33 per cent said the JLP.
"Don't forget that 31 per cent or a third were undecided as to who they believe could do better but, as with all of our results, there is such a direct political connotation. People who voted for the PNP tend to think they would do better while the voters for the JLP think they would do better," explained Johnson.

There was some good news for Golding as he approaches his second anniversary as prime minister, with Johnson finding that half the country expects that their economic situation will be no worse in the next two to three years.

Expected improvement
In fact, 40 per cent of respondents told Johnson that they expect their standard of living to improve by 2011 or 2012 when the next general election is due. Of that number, 14 per cent say they expect their situation to be much better.

"By a four to three ratio, people tend to be more optimistic about the future," noted Johnson, while pointing to the 30 per cent of Jamaicans who are bracing for a decline in their standard of living by 2012.
And even as four in every 10 Jamaicans gave Golding a vote of confidence in his ability to improve their standard of living, the respondents were clear that he needs to tweak if not overhaul his present economic measures.

A worrying 55 per cent said they disapprove of the job the Golding team is doing in handling the economy which has seen higher-than-anticipated interest rates and limited incentives for the productive sector.
Only five per cent of the respondents indicated strong approval for Golding's economic measures, showing that even supporters of his party have reservations about the measures his government has implemented over the past two years.

http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/glean...ead/lead3.html