Former President of JCSA Deems it an Honour to be Recognised

Immediate Past President of the Jamaica Civil Service Association (JCSA), O’Neil Grant, who was awarded the Order of Distinction, Officer Class (OD), on National Heroes Day (October 16), deems it an honour to be recognised by his country.

Mr. Grant acknowledges that representing public-sector workers is no easy feat but contends that “it is never expected that such an honour would be bestowed on someone for doing what is required of them”.

The former President of the largest public-sector union in the English-speaking Caribbean says when he first knew of the award, he was at a loss for words, “because we work not for reward but for the enjoyment of working, but it is definitely a return on the investment that I have made”.

Nevertheless, he is overjoyed that the Government of Jamaica saw it fit to honour him in this manner.

Mr. Grant was among just over 200 persons who were awarded on National Heroes Day for their contribution to the country.

The former JCSA President was at the helm for 12 years, the longest serving Head of the organisation, giving time and effort to advance the status of workers in Jamaica.

He is currently the longest serving Director on the Board of the National Housing Trust.

He has also served the credit union movement.

As President, he advocated for the establishment of paternity leave, a move which he notes, led to a groundswell in the labour market, with many businesses implementing it, followed by the Government under the Compensation Restructuring Programme.

Mr. Grant also raised his advocacy to the national level to fight for the elimination of contract employment, an issue which he points out came at the backend of his work as President.

He describes his upbringing as humble.

He attended Windward Road All Age (now Primary and Junior High) School, from where he graduated to attend Jamaica College.

He participated in track and field and was one of the co-captains of the track team.

“I did the 110-metre hurdles and had my fortunes been different, I would have taken up a scholarship offer to Florida State University, but injury problems prevented that, so I decided instead to just stay here in Jamaica and work and send myself to school,” Mr. Grant tells JIS News.

His describes his parents’ teachings as solid and says that they have had a significant impact on his life.

“My parents were poor in the economic sense, but in terms of what they taught us as children, it is what I refer to as a serious wealth of experience,” Mr. Grant says.

“There is a saying that my mother would always use when, as children, we misbehaved. She would say that we should let decency counteract our dirty mentalities,” he continues, explaining that what she meant was that if you act decent, you will always do well and that you do not have to revert to base behaviour to get things done.

Immediately after leaving high school, Mr. Grant joined the public service as an audit assistant, the lowest level of his chosen field.

He quips that the only thing that he could afford to purchase from his first paycheck was a calculator. He was then attending evening classes, doing his accounting qualifications.

Mr. Grant credits his rapid growth in the Ministry to always wanting to learn more about Government and its various projects and programmes.

He became somewhat disillusioned early in his tenure when after trying to introduce new things and new processes, he faced resistance and so “I thought that the Government was not able to allow an individual such as myself to grow.”

He joined the private sector, and while he gained invaluable experience there, he did the comparison between the private sector and the public service and decided that based on his aspirations, the public sector was the best placed to be.

“That is where you can have a national impact, and that desire brought me back to the Government, serving as an Accounting Supervisor, then Business Analyst at the Administrator General’s Department, then returning to mainstream administration as an Accountant and Senior Financial Analyst at the then Ministry of Agriculture,” he notes.

Mr. Grant also did a stint as Senior Director of Finance at the Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA).

He remembers well the teachings of the Rev. Cannon Peter Mullings at Jamaica College, who would say, “if you are speaking your truth you don’t have to shout to be heard.”

This, he says, resonated with him as a young man and molded his thinking and approach. Mr. Grant tells JIS News that he developed an interest in strategy when he pursued his master’s degree in business administration (MBA), at the then Mona School of Business.

He recalls with a smile how his team from his master’s programme took an idea that he had presented to them and won a local venture capital competition in 2010.

Unfortunately, busy schedules prevented the team from going on to the international competition in Atlanta.

According to Mr. Grant, he realised that Jamaica needed strategy to succeed as a country, so he focused his MBA on Export Marketing and International Strategy.

He shares that he reads widely on business strategy and identifies the most important of all the books that he has read on strategy as the Art of War, which taught him everything that he needed to know about strategy, about being patient and about being consistent.

Mr. Grant points out that this was what informed the current JCSA tagline: ‘Persistent and Consistent, Advocating for the Worker – Moving from Surviving to Thriving’.

He credits the actions that came out of the strategic plan that was implemented at the JCSA with the exponential growth in membership from 13,700 when he became President in 2011 to over 30,000 and growing in 2023.

Mr. Grant is most proud of his work on matters of compensation, saying that he cannot recall workers getting the level of increases that they have received under the compensation restructuring exercise.

He is also pleased with the outcome of earlier negotiations during a difficult period in Jamaica’s economic history.

“In my own estimation, I think my greatest achievement as President was our navigation through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme,” Mr. Grant says.

“When I came in, we were going through an austerity period, and we had to make a trade-off between wage increases and keeping jobs. It was a real threat, because the IMF insisted that the size of the public sector ought to be cut to channel funding to paying the debt,” he adds.

This, Mr. Grant says, followed an already difficult period of wage restraint from 2004.

Coming out of that period, he explains that the subsequent negotiations resulted in salary increases arising from the sacrifices that had been made and this was followed by the Compensation Restructuring Exercise.

Mr. Grant stepped down from his post of President in May 2023 and now serves in an advisory role to the President as an ex-officio member of the Executive Committee.