January 30, 2013 at 5:54 p.m.
Gov't must help growing number out of work and struggling to pay bills
The grassroots segment of the Progressive Labour Party is aging. Go to a branch meeting and you'll find that MPs and party supporters are in their golden years.
There is a huge gap between them and the younger voters, who have one or maybe two elections under their belts.
When I talk to some of the younger PLP members, I hear two things.
One is a growing resentment against the entire system of politics.
The other, more important trend, is that they are moving away from the Bermudian tradition of voting strictly along party lines. They are more interested in who is doing what for them.
This may not be of any great significance. But when the next general election comes, it will be interesting to see the voter turnout 12 years into a PLP Government and if people vote for individuals rather than parties.
Meanwhile, voters are looking around them with different eyes. What they see is crime taking its toll and a growing number of Bermudians out of work.
We've seen drug-related violent crime with few convictions.
Just wait until unemployment crime sets in.
Which brings me to my main point - we still don't know exactly how many Bermudians are out of work.
The latest guesstimate puts it at about 2,000, based on a 2009 Government survey. I say it is much higher than that.
Then there are people like my old school friend.
We go back as far as Powell's Nursery on Cedar Hill and Purvis Primary.
She went on to Berkeley Institute, I went to Warwick Academy.
Professionally, she has been in Bermuda's financial sector for as long as I have been a reporter, since the 1980s. Ten months ago she was made redundant and given a reasonable redundancy pay pack.
But she is still unemploy-ed and spending $3,000 a month just to live. Now she is digging into her savings.
She wakes up early every morning to watch her neighbours leave for work - and they include a long line of Third World nationals who glare back at her.
"You can feel what they are thinking," she told me. "It reeks of contempt. It says, 'Look, another one of those lazy black Bermudians who just don't want to work'."
Truth be told, it's really more about the rate of pay for non-skilled jobs and whether Bermudians can afford to take them.
And yes, we have lazy black people in Bermuda. But we have some lazy white Bermudians too!
There will always be those who choose not to work but what about those of us who do?
What about the growing number of Bermudians who are struggling to pay bills and find somewhere affordable to live?
The Bermuda Housing Corporation tells me the geared-to-income housing at Perimeter Lane has been further delayed.
Tenants are not expected to move in until this summer. Then there is the problem of landlords who prefer to rent to guest workers, charge them by the head and pack them into homes like sardines.
Unfortunately, there are no laws preventing private rental units being run like low-life guest accommodations.
So what happens to people like my longtime friend?
She wants to know exactly how many Bermudians like her are out of work and why Government is taking a Band Aid approach.
"Forget party," she told me. "This is about country."
More importantly, she wants to know why she should even vote.
In her house, the PLP party lines are broken.
The country's leader, Dr. Ewart Brown, says he will step down in October but I don't know if he'll call an election before that. If I were him, I'd put it on the back burner for now.
The electorate wants a few things fixed first - like where they are going to live if they cannot pay their rent because they are not working.[[In-content Ad]]
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