JAMAICA | Jason Russell Has Spoken. Who Speaks for Labour?

When the president of the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce declared that Jamaica’s labour laws favour workers “a little bit more than they should,” he did more than advance a business position. He reopened the country’s oldest unfinished argument — and exposed the silence of those who once fought it.

MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica, June 10, 2026 — Jason Russell did not set out to start a class war. Fresh from his unopposed re-election as president of the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce and Industry in late May, he was simply doing what chamber presidents do: advancing the interests of capital.

Jamaica’s “archaic labour laws,” he declared, favour the employee “a little bit more than it should.” Redundancy payments, he suggested, should be tiered to the size of the enterprise. Reform would be a centrepiece of his second term.

But as veteran commentator O. Dave Allen argues in a searching new essay, Russell has done Jamaica an accidental service. In a few unguarded sentences, he exposed what Allen calls “a contradiction that has been quietly growing within Jamaican society for decades: the unresolved conflict between capital and labour.”

A Statement Made in the Worst of Times

Consider the timing. Seven months after Hurricane Melissa shuttered hotels across the western tourism belt, thousands of hospitality workers — some with nearly two decades of service — sit at home without pay, without redundancy letters and without certainty, while contract workers are quietly deployed to the very properties they built.

Into this landscape steps organized capital, arguing not that workers need more protection, but less.

Allen is careful to note there is nothing scandalous about Russell’s position in itself. Capital has always defended its interests. The conflict between those who own and those who labour, he writes, “is not personal. It is structural.” The scandal lies elsewhere — in the field Russell found empty when he stepped onto it.

Merchants, Not Nation-Builders

To understand how the field emptied, Allen reaches back to Michael Manley. His democratic socialism rested on an alliance of all productive classes — workers, farmers, professionals, progressive entrepreneurs — united behind national development. It was a bold vision. But it depended on a fatal assumption: that Jamaica possessed a capitalist class willing to build.

What Manley inherited instead was a colonial-era elite of “margin-gatherers, import traders, commission agents, and inherited-property holders” — men who knew how to mark up and extract, but not how to construct the productive base that could absorb Jamaica’s working people into decent, high-wage employment.

The alliance required entrepreneurs; it got merchants. It required nation-builders; it got rent-seekers.

The consequences are all around us: a formal economy that still cannot generate enough quality jobs. Contract labour proliferating while union influence withers. Productivity gains that never reach the pay packet.

An informal economy of vendors, higglers, taxi operators and artisans built not from rejection of the system, but from exclusion by it. And beneath that survival economy festers something darker — the scammers, gangs and extortion networks that flourish wherever legitimate opportunity dies.

Fish or Fowl?

This is the landscape into which Russell speaks — and the reason his words land so heavily. Not because they are extreme, but because they meet so little resistance. The National Workers’ Union’s Khurt Fletcher pushed back, insisting that work is not a commodity but a social right, and that the worker remains the worker whether the employer is large or small.

But Fletcher’s was a lonely voice. Where, Allen asks, is the organized labour movement that once shaped national policy? Where is the political party prepared to speak unapologetically for workers?

That question lands squarely on Old Hope Road. The Jamaica Labour Party suffers no ambiguity: it has long been comfortable as the party of business, private enterprise and market-led development.

The ambiguity belongs to the PNP — a party founded as the political expression of workers, peasants and the marginalized, now strangely muted while organized capital argues, in the middle of a post-hurricane employment crisis, that redundancy protections are too generous. Allen puts the question in the language of the Jamaican people: Is the PNP fish or fowl?

It is the right question at the right moment. If labour has no champion, if working people have no political home, and if growth continues to bypass those who create the nation’s wealth, the tensions accumulating beneath Jamaica’s surface will not dissipate. They will deepen. The smoke, as Allen warns, is already visible.

And history is unsentimental about societies that ignore it. That is the fire next time.

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