“When I came here a number of years ago, Bermuda was a place where someone with ambition and without a college education could get a job in the hotel industry or in the trades and earn a middle-class standard of living. Those days are over now.”

— Sheelagh Cooper, Founder of the Coalition for the Protection of Children

When Bermuda is no longer working for Bermudians, what’s the point?

Certainly, growing numbers of Bermudians are now being forced to ask themselves that same question: retirees and seniors, our young with their unfulfilled aspirations. Households up and down the country struggling under an increasingly ruinous cost of living, as the middle-class society that we all knew continues to erode.

Or our workers bearing the brunt of poverty-level wages; or bank workers and others in the public and private sectors, many of whom have not had pay raises in close to a decade.

Hundreds, if not thousands, however, no longer ask that question and over the past four to six years have simply packed up their belongings, grabbed their children and left on the first available British Airways flight to the United Kingdom. The majority of whom are economic refugees in all but name.

To these Bermudians and their plight, the Premier Michael Dunkley, on Shirley Dill’s talk show, said that they should be happy that they have somewhere else to go.

In contrast, we in the Progressive Labour Party believe that we should fight to make Bermuda a place that Bermudians view as their first choice and not their second or third options when it comes to where they choose to live and pursue their aspirations for themselves and their families.

And if there is a poster child to symbolically represent all that which is poignantly and even cruelly eating away at the fabric of this society, it is a 26-year-old Bermudian woman with a four-your-old daughter with roots that go back to at least to the 1700s. She works in the restaurant industry.

Only three months ago, she related to me how over a two-week period she worked 69 hours. She did so as a so-called part-time worker and without the benefit of overtime pay. She also earned the less than princely sum of $7.50 per hour.

Margaret, which is not her real name, then showed me her pay stub and it revealed that she earned only $620.90 once payroll tax and social insurance were deducted, a poverty-level wage by anyone’s calculation and certainly not a living wage.

It amounts to no more than approximately $310 per week. Furthermore, she has no health insurance benefit as a so-called part-time employee. I hope that you are starting to get the picture.

Now Margaret does earn tips, but the restaurant in question, while always busy, is not a large establishment. So add to the above, on average, $110 to $120 of tips per week during that same period.

Will she be on the next flight to Britain with her daughter? The cost of living is lower there after all, even in London. And the social safety net is far more robust and extensive. Bermuda never made it to being No 1 in either cricket or football — no less, in our own region. However, it has earned a now dubious distinction nonetheless: Bermuda, by at least two or three surveys over the past 18 months — the last one conducted by The Daily Telegraph in England — is now the country with the highest cost of living in the world. Or let’s just say in the known universe. Certainly, the World Bank confirms that Bermuda’s cost of living is approximately four times that of our closest trading partner, New York City.

We are on a race to the bottom here. If the range of wages at the low end is now between $6 to $7.50 per hour, rest assured that if we do not arrest these trends, the hourly rate will surely migrate down to $4 to $5 per hour in short order.

The above is also fuelling higher levels of income inequality in Bermuda, which in turn naturally is exacerbating racial disparities. Surely, the nearly wholesale adoption and use of low-cost, foreign-sourced, low to medium-skilled labour by numerous Bermudian-owned and Bermudian-based companies has played a huge role in this. This phenomenon has directly suppressed wage growth and driven down wages over the past quarter-century, as the cost of living, as noted, has soared.

The question is what is to be done to address these destructive trends and what will happen if we fail to do so? First, in Bermuda — and the West, more broadly — if we fail to do so, we will continue to develop what is now called an “hourglass economy”.

That is an economy that disproportionately and richly rewards the owners of capital and the technocratic specialists and professionals at the top of the hourglass, who substantively benefit by the maldistribution of income as exists at present.

Meanwhile, the narrow and narrowing waist of the hourglass is represented by a shrinking Bermudian middle-income strata or what we commonly refer to as the middle class.

Predictably, at the widening bottom of the hourglass economy are found growing numbers of the low to semi-skilled. These are persons that can be rightly described as the working poor, if they are working at all, for largely poverty-level wages.

We know how this movie ends. One just needs to look to our west, to Central and South America or Africa; even to regions within the United States to see what these types of societies look like.

In fact, Bermuda, too, looked like this some 70 years ago or more. Are we there yet? No. But the trends that are present now indicate that we are at risk of heading in that direction.

As to some of the policy and legislative prescriptions that will be needed to combat the above and restore and maintain our status as a middle-class/middle-income society?

• The next Progressive Labour government intends legislatively to put in place a statutory wage floor to protect those most at risk by this race to the bottom. Will it be a living wage in year one? No. But we are committed to getting there — as in other countries, such as Britain, has committed to arrive at a living wage over a four to five-year period, while putting a statutory wage floor in place, as they did in year one of their scheme

• Make the necessary amendment to the Employment Act 2000 to eliminate the carve-out that allows employers to avoid paying their employees overtime

• Amend the Occupational Pensions Act 1998 to mandate that employers of foreign workers on work permits and the workers in question pay into the private pension scheme. It is now an established global principle that migrant workers should participate in the pension schemes that exist in the countries of their employment

Failure to enact the amendments noted earlier will allow these perverse disincentives to the hiring of Bermudians to continue with impunity, along with our social cohesion as a society. Naturally, there are a number of other reforms that are urgently required as well on this front. Including retraining programmes to better align training and education with the real-world, 21st-century economy, in partnership with the private sector and reviving a system of apprenticeships.

They will be highlighted in due course in our 2025 General Election platform document.

In closing, we in the PLP get it; yet it is clear that the One Bermuda Alliance, consumed by protecting the economic status quo, does not. We intend to make Bermuda work for Bermudians once again, by simply putting Bermudians first. Our people and the workers of Bermuda deserve no less.

• Rolfe Commissiong is the opposition MP and incumbent candidate for Pembroke South East (Constituency 21) in the upcoming General Election