Miss Lynne Beckles, West Indian journalist, commenting on the Jamaica Employers' Fedoration Bulletin of Sept. 1964, noted that the Federation had callously stated: "Employers were in no way responsible for the devising of ways and means of maintaining employment levels or of relieving unemployment? She called it the "rationale of greed and bloodsucking"
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The organised workers throughout the West Indies are showing concern for job security for the employed, and jobs for the unemployed. For perhaps the first time in 300 years of sugar exploitaticn of the Yest Indies, the sugar workers from the main sugar producing territories met to consider the questions of mechanisation, automation and unemployment, and took decisions covering severance pay, maximum advance notice and legislation to protect their interests. The Minister of Trade in Jamaica, knowing the explosion they sre sitting on, has warned private business men of their duty to provide jobs, while land reform (however inadequate) is being pressed by the Governnent so as to help to provide jobs on land at present kept idle. He claimed that th©se employers who disclaimed responsibility to provide jobs were in fact advocating ccmmunism. But certrinly the most interesting commentary on the crisis of sugar, and mechanisation and jobs, and the political snd social crisis which is emerging in the West Indies is the suggestion of the Jamaican Manufacturers of the possible need to find alternate crops if sugar cannot meet the social bill. This may yet come about.