Dear Editor,

Though a significantly lowered unemployment rate, of which the Andrew Holness-led Administration is currently boasting, is an important marker in Jamaica becoming a healthier economy, with all due respect to our hard-working brothers and sisters, a great deal of our local workforce can be likened to junk food, packed with partially or wholly unnatural fillers with little to no nutritional substance.

This is partly due to inadequate or unsuitable training for the demands of the workplace, but there is also an insidious basis for this. Increasingly, the Jamaican workforce is becoming less healthy.

A patron at a pharmacy once requested a supplement that would improve his brain health, explaining to the pharmacist that because the brain controls the rest of the body, doing so will translate to a healthier body. Local employees, especially with their technologically enabled access to vast amounts of information, think themselves to be smart, as smart as this said patron, or like Eve of the biblical Garden of Eden.

This persistent effort to try to outsmart our bodies is making us sick, and it is showing up in the increased frequency and durations of requests for sick days, sub-par performance/profitability, and the disease burden to individuals, families, and nation.

Another major issue as it pertains to the health of our workforce is our need to chat or feel connected, whether face to face or otherwise, with a hand-held or stationary device. Although this might be therapeutic to those involved, it may have a negative impact on worker productivity and be quite irritating to one’s superiors. It might also be an indication of the fragility of one’s spiritual health, because despite that which the health officials are choosing to publicise, loneliness has been deemed to be one of if not the leading cause of death.

Spiritual health makes available to those who have or seek it a comforter who will not forsake them.

Lastly, our local workforce often considers the bigger tasks and rewards at the expense of the seemingly lesser ones and usually focuses on the finished product or outcomes whilst largely disregarding the preparatory and preliminary efforts. This lends itself to prejudice and corruption. Jesus once reminded us of the technical relevance of the little things when he declared in Luke16:10, “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.”

While this Government, including its health ministry, is busy attempting to distract the private sector and the electorate from its failures, supervisors, managers, and business owners are bawling out for a healthier workforce and governing policies healthy in body, spirit, and temperament.

Andre O Sheppy

astrangely@outlook.com