Labour Commissioner Cyrus Griffith is among senior labour officials from the sub region who will be participating in a two day meeting convened by the OECS secretariat to discuss matters pertaining to labour.
Scheduled for Thursday 6 to Friday 7 June 2013, this is the first time OECS Labour Commissioners will meet regarding the OECS Labour Market Information System. Discussions will cover various issues confronting OECS-Departments of Labour (DOL) in setting up the OECS Labour Market Information System (LMIS) in their respective countries.
The overall objective of the meeting is to Identify and review challenges in establishing a national LMIS in OECS member countries paying special attention to the computerisation of Labour Departments.
Specific issues that will be dealt with at the meeting include:
- Adopting Information Technology in the work culture and processes of the Labour Departments;
- Engaging LMIS stakeholders to ensure their commitment and participation, including delivery of the necessary information/statistics; and
- Introduction of the ILO Labour Administrative System (LAS) software, including institutionalisation, enhancement, support services, training and funding issues
The Senior Labour officials will also formulate recommendations on:
- Measures needed to consolidate achievements in the areas identified;
- Support needed to strengthen the institutional framework and to provide the human resources needed for the LMIS, focusing on statistics and IT aspects; and
- The use of the LMIS in Employment, Labour Market and Labour policies and programmes, including the review and adoption of templates for annual reports on OECS national labour markets, based on the LMIS output:
This unprecedented meeting of Labour Commissioners has received support from with support from the 10th European Development Fund (EDF) as well as the International Labour Organisation’s Decent Work Team and Office for the Caribbean.
Mr. Sean Curtis Mathurin, the Coordinator for the OECS Labour Market Information System project advises that income and employment indicators are critical in analysing economic and social progress at both the macro and the micro levels: “Without these, no meaningful assessment of development performance is complete. Therefore it is critical for OECS Member Countries to have timely information on labour and income aspects of this process including; job losses and job creation, aggregate shifts in the allocation of labour between sectors and occupations, vacancies and job seekers, the quality of (new) jobs, the social costs of the transition process — including changes in income levels — and other information indicating how businesses and people are faring.”
The support from the European Union in convening the meeting of Permanent Secretaries and Labour Commissioners from OECS Ministries of Labour, is being provided under the project, Economic Integration and Trade of the OECS Region.
That project, which is being administered by the OECS Secretariat, is being financed out of resources from the 10th EDF regional programme, and seeks to contribute to the establishment of the OECS Economic Union as a single economic and financial space through the development of a harmonized policy, legislative, regulatory and administrative framework, and the enhancement of the institutional capacity and export competitiveness of OECS economies.
