O n the day of Bob Marley’s 79th birthday, February 6th, the editor-in-chief of Travel Weekly, Arnie Weissmann, gave free rein to Jamaica’s prime minister and its most important resort owner to pitch why Americans should continue to vacation in their country.
Prime Minister Andrew Holness and Adam Stewart, who heads up Sandals, the far flung Caribbean all-inclusive resorts from its base in Jamaica, were pushing back against a U.S. Department of State advisory that cautioned against travel to one of the most popular destinations among the islands. The advisory cited high crime and low-level hospital care when it renewed its existing alert at its third highest of four levels on January 1st.
Holness, Stewart and Weissmann all know that travel agents face liability claims from clients who they may not have informed about the advisory and who later become victims of crime while on the island.
Holness and Stewart pitched their case with salvos of distorting data including from a recent report in the U.K.’s Financial Times slathered in kumbaya that agents could also pass on to clients after addressing their own due diligence.
Holness: “The connection between Jamaica and the U.S. is not just a diplomatic relationship. It is a familial relationship. That needs to be established. We do have a strong tourism link, and our economy relies on it.”
Of Jamaica’s 4.1 million visitors in 2023, my own extrapolation from a 2021 report is that 1.5 million traveled from the U.S.
Once informed by travel advisors, clients can decide for themselves whether to visit or not.
In context
Sugar grown for export is finished. Jamaica now relies on tourism, bauxite mining and refining into alumina among other extractive industries for earning hard currency.
Visitors, as well as 1.4 million Jamaicans that live abroad in the U.S. and Canada — their numbers equal the native-born that live on the island — have more than 100 flights a week they can choose from for regular vacations or vacations to get back home. It’s less than a two-hour flight from airports in Miami and Fort Lauderdale to Montego Bay. Many Jamaican nurses and MDs staff US hospitals, while many MDs on the island have earned their credentials from U.S. and Canadian med schools.
Holness claimed a high state of preparedness for visitors that require evacuation, although without details. He did cite a hospital yet to open in Montego Bay that’s explicitly for children and adolescents up to 18 from across western Jamaica.
He and Stewart both acknowledged that acts of violence were high on the island; 65 murders in January alone (down from 81 in January last year). They pointed out that acts against visitors were fewer as a percentage of population than in most American cities so long as visitors “stay in the areas that are for touristic purposes.“
Here’s the puzzle
Aren’t all Americans enchanted by the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team, by fastest-ever Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt, by Marley, albeit his legend hardly burnished by the largely negative reviews of One Love released on Valentine’s Day.
Overall, then, no surprise that the Visit Jamaica website tells travelers that “[Y]ou will be welcomed . . . with warm hospitality wherever you go. . . [T]alk to Jamaicans wherever you go. You will be sure to learn some Patois before returning home, if you ever do.” Discover the roots of our culture as you stroll through the cobbled streets of historic towns, . . It’s time to explore all Jamaica has to offer. . .”
You could also credit Jamaica for not scrubbing its site clean of its invitations to seek out every-day island life the way that Carnival Cruise Line after two passengers from the Carnival Elation claimed they were drugged and raped at a resort beach on Grand Bahama Island, stonewalled requests for information. Government officials sided with Carnival, blaming the victims for what happened.
However, if Jamaica isn’t stonewalling, it’s concealing. That concealment diminishes what the website says about the people of Jamaica and the credibility of much else that the PM and Stewart told TW’s Weissmann.
In his Travel Weekly interview, Holness cites The Financial Times article for an assertion that Jamaica’s unemployment rate of only 4.5 percent ranks his country near full employment as part of its ”family connection” with the United States. However, social analyst Peter Espeut explains what your eyes might otherwise tell you where the Jamaican mass stifles in the ghettos that tourists are told to avoid, effectively ruling out visits to Kingston, Jamaica’s capital and cultural hub, as well as Montego Bay, its second city.
In an opinion piece in the Jamaica Gleaner, Espeut tells us that when the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN) in mid-August last year released the results of its April Labor Force Survey, that that claimed “further reduction in Jamaica’s unemployment rate to its record low 4.5 per cent — 1.5 points lower than the figure for the corresponding period in 2022. Holness described the announcement as “great news,” and said this means that “we are now close to full employment.”
The political danger in reporting on “underemployment”
Espeut reveals that STATIN considers someone to be “employed” if he works only one hour during the survey period. Additionally, STATIN does not report on people “underemployed.” LinkedIn explains that a main “reason for underemployment in Jamaica is the slow pace of economic growth. Despite efforts to diversify the economy, the country has remained heavily dependent on a few industries, such as tourism and agriculture.”
Result is that employment in the April 2023 Labor Force Survey soared from 43,300 to 1,312,600. Nowhere does STATIN report the number of hours worked weekly by their sample. How many in the sample worked only one hour, two, or three while the survey was underway?
“[W]ith [Satin’s] definition. . . we cannot conclude — by any stretch of the imagination — that Jamaica’s employed labour force is fully employed,” or nearly so.
“[S]o the April 2023 Labour Force Survey reports that only 61,300 Jamaicans are ‘unemployed,’ but it also reports that 725,700 Jamaicans are “outside the labour force.”
What does this mean? Does this large figure hide some persons who should really be called “unemployed”?
FULL TRUTH?
Result? It doesn’t matter whether you can feed your family. Government can allege that its anti-poverty policies lessen the chance that tourists will be robbed. Or as Espeut puts it, “[L]abour force statistics have propaganda value, and can be manipulated and interpreted’ to suit political agendas.”
And as for those windshield washers, a Kingstonian writes in Life of a Jamaican, “while I am not a big fan of these guys, they are trying to make a living. I prefer them doing this than robbing people.”
