Purkiss demands end to systematic exclusion of Jamaicans from vacation club management

Seventy cents of every dollar spent by an all-inclusive tourist in Jamaica leaves the country immediately through overseas travel agents, foreign-owned airlines, and international supply chains, whilst Jamaican professionals in the vacation club sector are routinely used to train expatriates who then arrive as their managers, Opposition Spokesperson on Tourism and Linkages Andrea Purkiss revealed during her maiden sectoral contribution in Parliament on Tuesday.

Drawing on fourteen years of personal experience inside Jamaica’s vacation club industry, Purkiss disclosed that approximately twenty vacation clubs operating across fifteen hotel properties in Jamaica, the majority Spanish-operated, generate around USD 150 million annually. For years, every project director and every sales director was an expatriate paid in US dollars, whilst Jamaican professionals generated the revenue on the sales floor without access to management titles or dollar-denominated salaries.

“Jamaican knowledge, Jamaican expertise, and Jamaican institutional memory are extracted and handed to a foreign national who arrives knowing less, earns more, and leaves with everything the Jamaican taught him. The Jamaican trains the boss. The boss rules over the Jamaican. One hundred and fifty million US dollars a year flows through this sector. And this Ministry has never once asked why barely a handful of Jamaicans hold management positions within it,” declared Andrea Purkiss, MP, Opposition Spokesperson on Tourism and Linkages

 Purkiss further revealed that many expatriate directors are granted Jamaican work permits within approximately two months of arriving as hotel guests, whilst long-serving Jamaican staff are placed on short-term contracts with deliberate breaks in employment to prevent them accumulating the right to permanency guaranteed under Jamaican labour law. The Minister of Tourism’s own data, she noted, confirms that sixty per cent of every dollar earned by the sector exits Jamaica without circulating in the domestic economy.

She called on the Government to audit work permit approvals in the tourism sector, mandate Jamaican management representation in all vacation club operations, and publish a binding tourism linkages targets report to Parliament annually.