Two significant, apparently separate, but connected reports appeared on the front page of this newspaper on Friday.

The most obviously eye-catching of these was about the estimated 4,000 people who turned up at the York Park Fire Station on Thursday, hoping to sit the entrance exam of the Jamaica Fire Brigade. The fire service is seeking only 100 recruits.

Firefighting, of course, may be the kind of dangerously exciting job that entices young people. But we are sure that for the bulk of those who turned up at York Park, it had nothing to do with ambitions fired up by the movies.

Simply, they were there because they wanted jobs. Youth unemployment in Jamaica is over 20 per cent. That figure, however, masks the depth of the problem of joblessness or, more appropriately, underemployment among young people.

York Park was metaphoric of a larger issue: Jamaica's failure to achieve sustained economic growth to deliver the numbers and quality of jobs so as to satisfy the basic requirements of the society.

Public-policy formulation

Herein is the connection between York Park and last Friday's other story: the election of a new executive by the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), headed by entrepreneur Joe M. Matalon, chairman of the ICD Group.

"We all want to live in a prosperous country and one way to do that is to influence public-policy formulation," Mr Matalon said.

We agree!

Mr Matalon, in this regard, proposes to continue his predecessor's agenda of talks on social partnership - a broad framework of policies on which society can agree as the basis for economic transformation. Such discussions have taken place in fits and starts, going back to the 1970s. They usually find traction in periods of crisis, such as the global one in which Jamaica currently finds itself ensnared, but lose momentum as soon as the worst passes. They tend to founder on the rocks of narrow sector interests, of which Mr Matalon is conscious, and which he says he is consciously seeking to avoid. He deserves support.

The basic narrative of discussion

But we would suggest that, in going forward, Mr Matalon and the PSOJ, as initiator of the dialogue, seek to alter, fundamentally, the basic narrative of discussion to make it far more inclusive and accessible - to the York Park crowd and beyond.

People appreciate, instinctively almost, the relationship between the level of productivity at the workplace and the ability of firms to sustain their employment or rates of pay. But this understanding does not easily translate into effective action. Part of the reason is a Jamaican ambivalence towards and distrust for entrepreneurial success and wealth, especially when success is represented by, in the Jamaican context, large, formal institutions or firms. There is a Jamaican characterisation employed for this species that is somewhere between a dirty word, distrust and ambivalence: Big Man.

Indeed, this attitude of uncertainty and distrust is reflected in, and thereby reinforced by the Government and the public bureaucracy that declare the private sector the engine of growth but maintain systems they presume as inherent thievery on the part of those they seek to regulate.

Mr Matalon has a lot to do. We would suggest that he might find it useful also to have a conversation with the Jamaican people in general. The narrative has to be reconfigured.

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