Welcome to Jersey – a land where inequality rules, OK?

A few indicators this week show that Jersey is still on the descent section of the path that leads through the recession.

Firstly, a couple of the major business showcase events of the year are either not happening at all or are still looking for sponsorship.

To put things in context, the Institute of Directors’ ball and the Chartered Institute of Marketing awards together attract up to 1,400 winers and diners. The events are normally held at the Hotel de France and include dinner and entertainment, including a speaker from the UK who may be paid between £5,000 and £10,000.

The cancellation of the IoD event is not only about money. There is something of a stigma attached to staging a corporate knees-up at the moment, partly because some of the bigger banks in the UK have been castigated in the national press for taking money out from the UK government with one hand and using it to have a good time with the other.

Anyhow, the fact is that these events provide useful income for Island firms, and from that flows a little extra tax revenue.

Think about the supply chain:

• The hotel gets a share and, if they are also the caterers, extra staff will be needed to ferry plates around and prepare the food.

• The wholesale suppliers of the food and (hopefully) local producers will gain sales. l Importers of wines and spirits will do a good trade. l The band (usually local) providing the entertainment will be paid.

• The shops who hire out or sell tuxedos and bow ties benefit, as do retailers of ladies’ ball gowns, hairdressers and beauty salons, nail bars, shoe shops, handbag retailers, shops that sell make-up and so on.

Then there are the designers who provide the logos for the table decorations, the sound and visual display engineers who put up the big screens and the microphones, and the marketers who source corporate gifts and the like.

On the night, taxi drivers are in big demand before and after the event. You could say that a show of these proportions is symbolic of the way that business drives our economy without our realising, most of the time. It’s only when it stops that we start to notice that it was ever there in the first place.

ANOTHER indicator that Jersey still has some way to go before it turns the corner is a statement by Chief Minister Terry Le Sueur in the States last week. Apparently he intends to make it even harder for businesses to take on people who have not lived in the Island for five years.

If applied, the move will probably be one of the most unpopular with the business world for many a long year.

Only last week the Jersey Chamber of Commerce quarterly survey showed that the biggest gripe firms have is that they can’t take on the staff they need even ,when people are standing in front of them asking for work.

Seasonal and tourism businesses get some leeway in high season, but other small firms and retailers have told me of instances where they have had to turn away skilled staff whom they would otherwise employ, even though they have not been able to find anyone with the required residential qualifications willing to do the job.

Neither will finance firms thank Senator Le Sueur, although they will still have the option of employing J-category staff for higher-level jobs. But they say that the rule is still too restrictive.

In essence, though, this is something that the States have to do, because otherwise there will be even larger numbers of Jersey school-leavers and graduates claiming income support and queueing up outside Highlands College to find something to keep them busy.

Students are being hit by a double whammy at the moment – not only are there fewer jobs available in the Island, but also there are fewer jobs in the UK. Add to that the pressure on parents who may be concerned about the cost of paying for university education.

Someone running a medium-sized business told me the other day that they had more than 50 applicants for one job, serving behind a counter. Go back a year and getting even one or two applicants would have been phenomenal.

A THIRD indicator is that even States employees are being told that they can’t have any more money this year. Economic Development Minister Alan Maclean recently described this as ‘a sea change’ – as indeed it is.

In previous recessions, I recall, even two per cent was considered miserly and resulted in unions protesting at the door.

Given that Jersey’s Retail Prices Index to June shows a four per cent rise in food costs alone over the past year, coming to terms with zero increase in pay packets is a particularly tasteless pill to swallow.

States workers do have one comfort, however: they still have their final-salary pensions to look forward to.

Pensions experts in the Island have long been urging for a rethink, along the lines of most private-sector companies. They say the States should not be using public funds to bolster public-sector pensions. Those pension pots have suffered losses in recent months and will no doubt need shoring up even further.

FOURTHLY, the unheard of is now being heard of. Cuts in public spending have never been known in recent years, to my knowledge, in this Island of plenty.

Even more surprisingly, the first facilities to be hit are those provided for those who are least able to complain: patient transport, which enables people to attend a day care centre; and a youth club and family centre, with the loss of up to ten staff.

We are told that Treasury Minister Philip Ozouf has never had personal contact with these services, yet he is prepared to sign away their existence.

Contrast this with the £44 million from the stabilisation fund that this same minister is pouring into economic ‘stimulus’ – much of it, it seems to me, to be used to shore up existing States budgets and to pay for things that were previously paid for from existing departmental funds.

Shame indeed. Or perhaps shame is too passive a word for the unspeakable inequality that is about to take hold in a community which has, to date, been prepared to resist it.