Reading Time: 9 minutes

Earlier this month, a member of one of my teams asked to move into an artificial intelligence function. He was not wrong to be excited; AI is reshaping how we work, and his instinct to chase it was a good one. But I had to explain something that gets lost too easily in a moment like that: excitement is not the same thing as economic necessity. A company cannot staff itself according to what its people find most interesting. It has to put people where the skills are needed, where demand exists, and where the business earns the revenue that pays everyone’s salary, allowing for future exploratory investment. A country works the same way. Jamaica cannot decide what its economy should look like based on what is fashionable. It has to look at where the demand actually is, and right now, the demand is loud, specific, and largely unmet.

That conversation kept returning to me as I read Sherwin-Williams’ confirmation, reported by the Jamaica Observer, that it had permanently ended paint manufacturing at its White Marl plant in St Catherine on July 31, 2026, closing a production line that had run since 1974. The company will now import products it used to make at home and distribute them through its existing local network. I am not citing this as evidence about any one company’s strategy. I am citing it as a prompt: when a manufacturer with more than fifty years on the island decides local production no longer clears the bar, it is worth asking what that bar has become, and whether Jamaica’s labour market can still clear it. That question is what this piece is actually about.

The paradox in the numbers

Jamaica’s labour story is usually told through a single figure: the unemployment rate. That figure looks good. It should not be read as the whole story. STATIN’s own data shows the labour market cooling even as unemployment stays historically low. Between April 2025 and April 2026, employment fell by 25,700 people, the labour force itself shrank by 20,500, and the unemployment rate ticked up from 3.3 to 3.7 per cent. Youth unemployment rose more sharply, from 10.1 to 11.7 per cent, with young women facing a rate of 14 per cent against 9.9 per cent for young men. In the January 2026 survey, the labour force was already 32,900 people smaller than a year earlier, employment among young people had fallen by 11.1 per cent, and labour-force participation had slipped from 68.4 to 66.8 per cent. Some of this reflects Hurricane Melissa’s toll on the five western parishes it hit hardest, where the number of people outside the labour force rose by more than 20 per cent. But even accounting for the storm, the broader trend predates it: fewer Jamaicans are working, and fewer are even looking.

At the same time, employers describe a labour market with the opposite problem, not too few jobs, but too few people who can do them. The World Bank’s 2024 Jamaica Jobs Diagnostic found that only 56 per cent of Jamaican workers in 2019 held qualifications that matched what their jobs actually required, against an OECD average of 66 per cent. That gap is not a rounding error. It means close to half the workforce is either over- or under-qualified for the role it occupies, a mismatch that shows up as both idle talent and unfilled positions in the same economy at the same time.

Nowhere is that contradiction sharper than in construction. The sector now contributes roughly 10 per cent of GDP and is growing on the back of an expanding housing pipeline, yet industry estimates put its job vacancy rate at 18 per cent. In the Senate this year, Government Senator Kavan Gayle warned that billions of dollars in available financing for housing and infrastructure could go unspent simply because there are not enough carpenters, masons, electricians and plumbers to do the work, and that the shortage has worsened noticeably since Hurricane Melissa. The Bank of Jamaica estimates that roughly 22,000 skilled workers emigrate every year, a drain that falls hardest on exactly the trades the housing programme needs. Layered on top of that is demography: Jamaica’s working-age population, 66 per cent of the total in 2025, is projected by the UN Population Division to fall to 61 per cent by 2035, driven by a fertility rate of 1.3, well below the 2.1 needed to replace the population. Jamaica is not simply short of workers today. It is on a trajectory to be shorter of them tomorrow, at precisely the moment its housing and infrastructure ambitions require more.

This is not an unemployment problem. It is a labour-market problem, and the distinction should shape policy. A country can carry a low unemployment rate while still lacking the specific, practical capabilities required to build, wire, plumb, maintain and expand a modern economy.

What the physical economy still demands

Walk through any active construction site in Jamaica and the shortage becomes visible immediately. Electricians, plumbers, masons, welders and carpenters are described by contractors as scarce, expensive, and increasingly able to pick their jobs, a dynamic the Observer described plainly in June, noting that skilled tradespeople are now “hard to find” and often doing clients a favour by showing up at all. Wage data confirms the squeeze: the 2026–2027 JIB-PMES agreement set a formal 3.4 per cent increase for plumbers, pipefitters and mechanical trades, but actual market rates are already running well above that baseline, a sign that demand is outrunning the negotiated wage structure itself.

This scarcity persists despite decades of public investment in technical training through HEART/NSTA, which suggests the problem is not only about training capacity. It is also about incentives and prestige. A generation was told, correctly in part, that a degree was the route to security. What got lost is that a degree is a credential, not a skill, and the economy pays for what a person can actually do. A qualified electrician will rarely go without work. A good plumber does not need to check whether plumbing is trending. Buildings do not stop generating demand once construction finishes; they need decades of electrical work, painting, roofing, air-conditioning servicing and general repair, which means every home Jamaica builds now is also a future job that has not yet been filled.

The same logic will likely hold through the AI transition many businesses, including my own, are now navigating. AI will automate a meaningful share of knowledge work: drafting, analysis, design iteration, administrative processing. It will not fix a leaking pipe, rewire a panel or service a compressor. The physical economy stays stubbornly physical. If anything, that should raise the status of trade work, not lower it, because the set of tasks that remain scarce and irreplaceable is about to get more valuable, not less.

The influencerisation of work

Jamaica’s digital economy is creating real opportunity, but it is also reshaping what young people believe a career should look like. Call it the influencerisation of work: an increasing emphasis on visibility over utility, on being seen doing something rather than being needed to do it. There is nothing wrong with wanting to build an audience or a personal brand. But influence is not itself a productive sector unless it sits on top of something of value — and there is a hard ceiling on how many people can occupy the visible tier of any economy.

Someone still has to build the house the influencer films from. Someone has to wire it, plumb it, and repair the air conditioning when it fails. Someone has to run the machinery that makes the product being advertised, and someone has to maintain the road the delivery truck uses to get it there. A viral video cannot repair a compressor. A personal brand cannot install an electrical panel. The point is not to discourage ambition; it is to insist that ambition include an honest accounting of demand, because passion is not a business model and excitement is not the same thing as an addressable market.

Foundations before function

Here is the part of this problem that gets the least attention, and deserves the most: none of the workplace habits businesses are complaining about, punctuality, reliability, accountability, tolerance for repetitive or unglamorous work, are formed at the office. They are formed, or not formed, at home, years before a person’s first job.

The evidence on this is not speculative. Research on children’s self-regulation, the capacity to delay gratification, manage frustration, and follow through on commitments, which is the psychological substrate underneath every one of the “soft skills” employers say they can’t find, consistently links its development to the quality and consistency of parenting and coparenting a child receives early in life. In Jamaica, an estimated 47 per cent of children grow up in single-parent households headed by their mother, with research describing a continuing erosion of fathers from the family structure. Jamaican researchers studying parenting and adolescent outcomes have separately documented patterns of harsh discipline and limited emotional support in a share of households, patterns that the psychological literature associates with weaker self-regulation and, later, weaker workplace reliability. None of this means an employee from a single-parent household is destined to struggle at work, and none of it should be read as a judgment on any individual family. Human development is too complex for a single variable to explain it. But it would be equally wrong to pretend that a national shift in family structure has no downstream effect on the workforce a nation produces ten and twenty years later.

Businesses should not have to parent their employees. But businesses are, whether they intend to or not, the place where the gaps left by earlier institutions become visible and expensive. If Jamaica wants a more reliable workforce in fifteen years, the intervention that matters most may not be another training programme. It may be sustained public and private investment in the stability of the household, parenting support, coparenting resources, and early-childhood programmes that build self-regulation before a child ever files a job application. This is not a soft or sentimental point. It is a labour-supply strategy with a longer time horizon than any single policy currently being discussed.

Why the same worker performs differently abroad

The clearest evidence that Jamaicans are capable of the discipline employers say they want is the Jamaican diaspora itself, which performs consistently well in the United States, Canada and Britain. Jamaican workers do not become more capable by crossing a border. What changes is the system around them. More structured labour markets make the link between performance and consequence explicit: expectations are written down, performance is measured, and poor performance carries a cost that both employer and employee can see coming.

This is not an argument for stripping away Jamaican worker protections or importing another country’s labour code wholesale; it should not be. It is an argument that Jamaicans tend to rise to the level of the systems they are placed inside. Structure is not a punishment. It is information, and workers use it.

Jamaica cannot be competitive at everything

There is a broader discipline problem sitting above the labour-market one: a habit of trying to distribute attention and investment evenly across every sector and every interest group, rather than concentrating resources where Jamaica actually has a competitive edge. No country succeeds by making every sector equally happy. It succeeds by identifying where it can win, tourism, technology, logistics and maritime services, agriculture, creative industries, specific manufacturing niches and building disproportionately there. That is an analytical exercise, not a political one. It asks where demand is growing, where productivity can rise fastest, and where investment produces the largest multiplier, then commits accordingly. The same logic applies inside a company deciding where to put its best people, and inside a household deciding where to put its labour. Concentrated investment is not abandonment of everyone else. Historically, it is what has funded everyone else.

The question Jamaica actually needs to answer

The debate about Jamaica’s labour force is not really a debate about whether young people are lazy. It is a debate about what kind of workforce the country is currently producing, relative to the one its economy needs, in skills, in reliability, and in the household stability that produces both. Jamaica cannot tell an entire generation to follow their passion and then be surprised the country is short of electricians. It cannot celebrate a construction boom while leaving an 18 per cent vacancy rate in the trades that build it. And it cannot keep measuring the health of its labour market by a single unemployment figure while the underlying capability to do the work the economy needs continues to erode.

The jobs are here. The financing is here. The construction is here. What remains an open question is whether the labour, in the fullest sense, meaning skills, discipline and the household foundations that produce both, will be here to meet it. If Jamaica gets that question wrong, the real cost will not show up in the unemployment rate. It will show up in the productivity the country quietly loses while mistaking a low jobless number for a healthy labour market.

---

Kemal Brown is a Jamaican serial entrepreneur, strategist, and advocate for sustainable national development through innovation, leadership, and economic strategy. His work and commentary often explore the intersection of business, culture, technology, and human development, with a particular focus on the values and systems necessary for long-term progress in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean.