Senator Cleveland Tomlinson rose in Jamaica’s Upper House last Friday with a message that cut through the usual political bravado: an economy can look healthy on paper and still be failing the people it is supposed to serve. Speaking in the State of the Nation Debate, the opposition spokesman on productivity, efficiency and competitiveness said he is not impressed by Government claims of successful economic management because the lived experience of ordinary Jamaicans is out of sync with those claims. “We are not only concerned about an economy on paper, and that is what the Government is caught up about. We are about whether the economy is matching the lived experiences of the people,” he told senators. Tomlinson was careful not to dismiss traditional indicators such as growth, investment, and public finances; they matter, he said. But he insisted that the real test of an economy is not found in reports and press releases. It is found in the lives of citizens. It is found in the factory worker who opens his pay envelope after a fortnight of labour and realizes that the money cannot cover both his electricity bill and the groceries his family needs. Tomlinson put it in the plain language of the working poor: “a fortnight cyaah cova him light bill and buy food.” It is found in the young people who graduate from UWI, UTech, NCU and other institutions with degrees and dreams, only to discover that their hard-won qualifications have not opened the doors they expected. It is found in the entrepreneur who has a promising idea in her head but cannot find the financing, mentoring, and supportive ecosystem to build a business around it. These are not side issues, Tomlinson argued; they are the heart of the matter. When people cannot see their own struggles reflected in Government statistics, then the numbers lose their meaning. It is not that the Government is making things up, Tomlinson seemed to concede, but that it is looking at the wrong things. The economy may indeed be growing, and inflation may be under control in official documents, but growth and control do not mean much to someone who cannot pay a bill or put food on the table. A statistic is not a life; a projection is not a promise. Until the people can see and feel the progress, the progress is not real.
Tomlinson took that argument deeper by explaining how ordinary Jamaicans experience the economy in far more immediate ways than quarterly reports or credit ratings. It is the price of food in the market, the number of hours worked for a paycheck that still seems too small, the shrinking hope that a better job will come along, and the constant anxiety that an unexpected emergency could push a family over the edge. The factory worker, the university graduate, and the aspiring entrepreneur each face a distinct but connected version of the same problem: the system is producing numbers that look encouraging while their daily reality remains stubbornly difficult. The economy is supposed to be a tool for improving human well-being, Tomlinson suggested, but too often it becomes an end in itself. He questioned whether the country is chasing growth for growth’s sake, or growth that actually raises living standards. Jamaica has seen periods of economic expansion, but if that expansion is creating mostly precarious, low-paying jobs, and if the cost of living keeps climbing faster than wages, then the ordinary person is left to wonder what all the celebration is about. The senator’s language was plain, sometimes blunt. He spoke of a disconnect between the official narrative and the country’s kitchens, paying special attention to the rising number of Jamaicans who are not sure where their next meal is coming from. When a person works full-time and still cannot afford basic needs, something is wrong with how prosperity is being defined. Tomlinson urged senators to think about the young graduate carrying student debt and unable to move out of a parent’s house; the entrepreneur with a prototype but no access to seed funding; the single mother trying to juggle multiple jobs and still falling behind. These are the faces behind the statistics. He said the experiences of these Jamaicans raise an important question about the kind of economic progress the country is pursuing and the extent to which that progress is being reflected in their lives. It is a question that turns abstract debates about GDP into a conversation about dignity, opportunity, and survival. If the economy is not working for the bricklayer, the waitress, the call center agent, and the small farmer, then who is it working for?
Then Tomlinson turned to food, and the debate shifted from statistics to stomachs. He cited a study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization covering two periods: 2019 to 2021 and 2021 to 2023. The findings are sobering. Fifty-five per cent of Jamaicans are facing food insecurity, and twenty-eight per cent are going hungry. That means more than one in four Jamaicans does not have enough to eat, or worries constantly about where the next meal will come from. Tomlinson said these are not just numbers; they are children sitting down to dinner with less than they need, parents skipping meals so their kids can eat, and the elderly silently enduring hunger because there is nothing else to do. He told the Senate that this is the true measure of whether the economy is progressing—what is happening in the lives of the people. What makes the data even more alarming is how Jamaica compares with its Caribbean neighbours. When the FAO examined the region, only Haiti, the poorest country in the Caribbean, had a worse food insecurity record than Jamaica. In every other Caribbean country for which data was available, food insecurity either stayed constant or declined over the review period. Jamaica was the only country where severe food insecurity actually increased. He stressed that point to remove any doubt about what the numbers meant: while the region was moving forward or at least holding steady, Jamaica was moving backward on the most basic measure of human welfare. It is hard to talk about economic success when so many citizens cannot reliably feed themselves and their families. Food insecurity at this scale undermines health, educational outcomes, productivity, and social stability. It is both a symptom of economic failure and a cause of future problems. Tomlinson did not accuse the Government of causing hunger deliberately, but he made it clear that hunger is the result of choices and priorities. When a nation celebrates its economic management while a significant share of its people cannot afford a proper meal, he seemed to be saying, those priorities are dangerously out of order.
Tomlinson’s broader point was that progress cannot be measured by averages because averages can hide deep pain. A country can report economic growth and low unemployment while millions of households are still struggling. He urged senators to ask themselves what kind of progress Jamaica is pursuing. Is the goal simply to make the country look good to international investors, or is it to improve the quality of life for every Jamaican? He acknowledged that official indicators such as inflation, debt levels, and GDP growth are important, but he argued that they are incomplete. They do not capture the fear in a parent’s eyes when the school fee is due, the shame of a worker who cannot provide for his family, or the frustration of a young person with talent and no outlet. The economy, he said, must be experienced in concrete ways: a paycheck that covers the bills, a job that offers more than survival, a business environment where ideas can grow, and a society where no one has to choose between buying food and paying for light. By focusing so heavily on the economy on paper, Tomlinson suggested, the Government has lost sight of the people that the economy should serve. He called for a new approach, one that places lived experience at the center of policy-making. This would mean measuring success not only by how much is produced but by how many people are flourishing. It would mean asking whether economic gains are reaching the bottom half of society, whether opportunities are genuinely open to all, and whether the country is building a foundation for long-term resilience rather than short-term headlines. In the absence of that deeper measurement, he said, celebratory talk of economic success rings hollow for the thousands of Jamaicans who are still left behind. The Government’s boast may impress foreign investors at conferences, but at home, in the communities where people are struggling to make ends meet, it sounds disconnected from reality. That disconnect, Tomlinson insisted, is not just a political problem; it is a fundamental failure of economic vision.
Tomlinson then raised an urgent concern about the business process outsourcing industry, a sector that has been promoted by successive administrations and has created thousands of jobs in Jamaica. He acknowledged that the BPO industry has offered employment opportunities to many Jamaicans, especially young people, and that it has become an important pillar of the economy. But he warned that the industry is approaching a major transition as artificial intelligence begins to take over routine customer service tasks, the very tasks that have fueled much of Jamaica’s BPO growth. In the future, he argued, the industry will depend more heavily on the ability of operators and workers to make productive use of new technologies. The question for the Government is whether it has been sufficiently deliberate in preparing that workforce and domestic BPO operators for that inevitable shift. Tomlinson said that celebrating a low unemployment rate of 3.7 per cent is not enough if so many of the jobs being created are low-skill, low-wage positions that could disappear in the coming years. He called it “tantamount to selling the people an illusion of progress; a false sense of economic security; I call it false prosperity.” The phrase captures his frustration. Yes, more people have jobs today, but what kind of jobs? Are they jobs that allow families to live with dignity? Are they jobs that will exist in five or ten years? Are they jobs that can adapt to technological change? These are the questions the Government should be asking, Tomlinson said. Instead, he sees a country resting on the laurels of a favorable unemployment statistic while failing to invest in the skills, training, and innovation needed for an uncertain future. He warned that without deliberate preparation, Jamaica could be left behind as global companies automate customer service and shift to more complex, higher-value work. Education and training systems must be aligned with changing technological realities. Workers need digital skills, problem-solving abilities, and technical knowledge. Small businesses need access to capital and support to adopt new tools. Without these measures, he argued, the BPO sector could become another story of false prosperity—good for a time, but unable to provide sustainable livelihoods in the age of artificial intelligence.
Yet Tomlinson was not simply painting a gloomy picture. He also pointed out that technological change, while threatening some traditional activities, is opening doors for smaller countries to participate in higher-value segments of the global economy. The growing importance of specialized professional services, software development, research, digital products, intellectual property, and the arts means that economic opportunity is no longer determined exclusively by the size of a country’s domestic market or its capacity to undertake large-scale manufacturing. In other words, a small nation like Jamaica can compete in the twenty-first-century economy if it invests in its people and positions itself for the future. That requires an honest conversation about priorities. It requires governments to move beyond slogans and statistics and to build real partnerships with businesses, workers, and educational institutions. It requires a national strategy for artificial intelligence and the future of work, one that does not just react to changes but shapes them. Most of all, it requires a vision of economic progress rooted in human well-being. Tomlinson’s speech was, at its heart, a demand for an economy that works for ordinary Jamaicans. He wants a Jamaica where a fortnight’s pay can cover the light bill and groceries. He wants graduates to find meaningful work that uses their qualifications. He wants entrepreneurs to get the support they need to turn ideas into enterprises that create jobs and wealth. He wants a Jamaica where no child goes to bed hungry because the country claims the economy is doing well. These are not impossible dreams, but they will not be achieved by celebrating an economy on paper. They will be achieved by looking at the lived experience of the people, listening to their struggles, and building policies that address those struggles directly. Until then, Tomlinson argues, the official claims of success will remain hollow, and too many Jamaicans will continue to live with what he calls false prosperity. The true measure of progress, the Senator insisted, is not in the charts and tables but in the lives of the people—whether they can eat, work, learn, and hope. That is the economy that matters, and that is the economy Jamaica must build.