Guest Workers and Resistance to U.S. Corporate Despotism

5. The Migration of Low-Wage Jamaican Guest Workers

5 the Migration of low-Wage Jamaican Guest Workers Every March, as the winter storms turn into spring breezes on the U.S. mainland, the temperature in the Caribbean islands becomes scorching hot. Right after spring break at U.S. high schools, colleges, and universities, the Caribbean tourist season comes to a close, business slows, and resorts operated by corporate hotel chains lay off tens of thousands of housekeepers, cooks, waiters, busboys, and porters. Traditionally, most of these workers would then remain jobless for the next six months, until throngs of tourists descended once again on the islands’ beaches to escape the northern winters. This changed for many, however, in the late 1990s, when an increasing number of hospitality workers in the Caribbean began making six- to nine-month sojourns to the United States and Canada to work in hotels and restaurants, performing work that North American employers say is necessary to their businesses. Those lucky enough to find jobs up north are highly trained in all the facets of hospitality—from cooking or waiting on customers to landscaping and cleaning guestrooms. A number of factors in Jamaica push hospitality workers to participate in this temporary guest worker migration. Among the first of the independent countries in the area to be targeted by the IMF in its efforts to force liberalization of the economy and reduced spending on social needs, the Jamaican economy plunged in 1977 following an IMF-imposed program of structural reform and economic liberalization. This program compelled President Michael Manley to sign an austerity repayment plan of more than $4.5 billion in debt to a number of lenders, including the IMF, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). The repayment plan called for severe monetary penalties if Jamaica failed to repay the loans for money spent on building public infrastructure during the country’s first fifteen years of independence in order to support the development of the tourist industry. As a result of that program, the national government regressively discontinued providing essential public services that had been a mainstay for the workingclass and rural peasant populations from independence in 1962 to 1975. In the 1980s, soaring inflation reduced the capacity of the national and county governments to provide free education, preventive health care, medicine, and affordable housing. Now, most Jamaicans rely on the private neoliberal market to provide essential services. High inflation wreaks havoc on the precarious economy and on the working class, which continues to grow ever more dependent on tourism and hospitality services, which became increasingly important after bauxite mining for aluminum declined in the 1970s. Turning to private solutions for Jamaica’s economic woes has not created prosperity in the country, but instead has exacerbated class divisions and intensified poverty in both urban and rural areas. For example, a good education in Jamaica is not free; almost all highly regarded primary and secondary schools are private institutions. Education is essential to getting a job, but many parents of working-class children cannot afford secondary schooling. The private preparatory schools that children aged four to eleven attend are considered far superior to public schools, now considered a luxury too. This kind of preparatory education is essential for getting into secondary schools and then on to postsecondary institutions, which are called tertiary schools for vocational training. But too many of the country’s children are excluded from this system altogether. It is clear that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the leading multilateral agencies (World Bank, IMF, and WTO) that a market economy is the way to achieve national aĀuence, privatization has visibly impaired most occupational sectors. At the same time, however, the private sector has relied on government investment, and tourism and private security have flourished. Jamaica’s paradox is that this privatization has eroded even the private sector as the declining value in the country’s currency has sharply reduced investment in productive activities, thereby turning Kingston—the nation’s capital and population center—from a bustling commercial hub into a veritable ghost town. Even in broad daylight, few locals and tourists venture to walk through the center of the city, which under British colonial rule and the formative years of independence in the 1960s had been home to banks, hotels, commercial shipping, finance, major sporting events, tourism and entertainment, and education. A half-century later, the most-visible politi112 . chapter 5 cal-economic activity in downtown...