By Peter Polack

Peter Polack

Across the world the latest employment trend has shifted from the employer to the worker especially in the technology sector. Multiple employment opportunities are available on several specialist websites that promote competition for the services of the most adept in their field. This invariably gives rise to better wages and better working conditions.

Long service awards have become a rare thing of the past as the newly mobile employees have turned the tables on the old patriarchal model to a sensible meritocracy.Bosses now compete for the services of the best and actively provide updated conditions to keep good workers.

The Japanese salarymen of old and their Caribbean contemporaries are the last vestiges of feudalism that has disappeared over the horizon of social networks.

The counter intuitive opposite of this necessary trend had been Caribbean government and related associations which see portfolio leaders maintaining their sinecure positions for multiple decades.Unsurprisingly, this is a mirror of their colonial masters and the gatekeepers of Whitehall that provide a comforting uniformity of thought and lackadaisical performance for the revolving door elected politicians.

The banality of non performance in a changing world.

Multiple oversight bodies have not provided a solution that is in front of everyone.

The concrete life employment of the dreaded ex officio positions often misnamed general such as attorney general or solicitor general or managing director should be subject to term limits. It is the only guarantee of performance.

The segue for this evolutionary and now common trend would be police commissioners, judges and the like. In the modern outside world police commissioners can come from the thinking world and not the operational space or within institutions they will ultimately lead.

Judges do not always have to be former prosecutors or magistrates. The profession is awash with seasoned defence practitioners who can bring balance to the bench.A few of them even have the watered down initials of the hierarchy approved sub class.

Proof positive is the ever increasing backlog of cases in overburdened facilities and spiraling crime. New buildings are not necessarily the answer, just follow the methodology of the bright, new, outside, modern world.

In this, many Caribbean countries, mostly colonies, are the benchmark for repeating the same error with the same result.

There can, in this, be no criticism of a disenfranchised and disillusioned youth, many of whom find outlet at the train stations going to overwhelmed prisons.

END

Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer in the Cayman Islands for several decade. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88. His views in the above release are his own