Scott Cummings Dean of the International College of the Cayman Islands

By Tad Stoner
tad@caymannetnews.com

The first survey of employment trends amongst Caymanians is scheduled to be completed next week, and is expected to reveal a growth in demand for semi-skilled workers, and an ongoing need for training.

The survey will follow the 2007 Cayman Islands Labour Force Survey Report, and seek information on almost 1,300 job seekers that had registered with the Department of Employment Relations (DER), determining their employment status.

“This audit will verify for the first time the number of those who registered and who are working and those who aren’t,” said DER Director Lonny Tibbetts.

He said current 3.82 percent unemployment in the Cayman Islands was “about average”, consistent with 2007, when 1,059 Caymanians were unemployed out of a total of almost 18,500 in the labour force, and 336 non-Caymanians were unemployed out of a total of nearly 18,000.

“We are trying to create a plan and get a sense of what the cause of unemployment is – whether it is that people have limited skills or whether they have the skills, but there are no jobs in that area,” he said.

“This will be a comprehensive examination to look at this. It’s probably always been there,” he said, but 2004’s Hurricane Ivan, which hit the Cayman Islands in the midst of an economic boom, had obscured a proper evaluation of employment patterns.

The telephone survey started just before Christmas, according to Assistant Director of Labour Market Research Yoshneck Mutomba.

“This will break down the [2007] report,” he said. “We are trying to corroborate the numbers with the people who have registered with us. We had about 1,400 people registered for jobs and we found work for about 400 in the last year.

“We’re making phone calls right now, contacting Caymanians for an update on where they are working and to get an idea of how many people that had registered with us are employed or not.”

In the last three years, Mr Tibbetts said, the economy had divided into roughly three areas of demand: for skilled professionals, an area of modest growth that absorbed about 20 percent of the nearly 36,500 members of the labour force; unskilled labour, a shrinking sector; and an exploding semi-skilled sector, increasingly populated, however, by skilled expats.

“You have to look at the evolution of Caymanian labour,” Mr Tibbetts said. “It started with the need for gardeners and masons and other manual labourers, but now we have tapped into a labour market in which, for example, some people from abroad are presenting skilled labour in doing unskilled jobs that they are willing to do for, say $4.50 per hour, and that Caymanians won’t do for less than $10 per hour.

“What you have is the level of [required] skills is far outpacing what Cayamanian educational levels have. I would like to have a bigger educational base. The reality now is that, all right, you have a job, but now, in these times, how secure is that?

“The department is seeing things we haven’t seen before; layoffs and severance packages. A recession tends to fight against luxuries and people come here to work and to save for one or two years and give up luxuries. We are talking to restaurants and bars that say they have laid people off and cut back on services they used to maintain. And who do you want to keep on: someone on $4.50 per hour or Caymanians at $7 per hour?”

Still, Mr Tibbetts predicted a short-term jump in overall Caymanian employment as “sometimes it’s less expensive to employ Caymanians, and the employer will take a chance and not have to pay work-permit fees, administration fees, repatriation fees.

“But the biggest problem will always be employability. You need to acquire skills in the long term,” he said, observing that economic downturns usually meant increased enrolment in local training courses.

Scott Cummings, Dean of the International College of the Cayman Islands (ICCI), said he had seen steady growth in student rolls, but, more importantly, increasing numbers of adults seeking new skills.

“For example,” he said, “we offer a course on spreadsheet applications, a course that holds between 12 students and 15 students. One-third of them are not regular students here. I am seeing people looking for a better education, and the current economic condition is one of the factors.

“Our target market is people already working, people who see the need to get new or better skills, and who attend classes at night trying to keep up with the competition as new and skilled students come out of places like the University College.”

ICCI’s full evening roster recently forced Mr Cummings to explore late-afternoon classes in accounting and general legal-principles.

“We made our minimum enrolment, and a little more,” he said, ‘and we are offering skills classes in match, reading and writing.

“We always see this in times of economic downturn – people coming back for additional education. As companies look to trim their workforces, people like to put their skills on the table to retain their employment or even move up,” Mr Cummings said.