Bad for business
The labour dispute at the University of Guyana has brought to mind the debate of whether or not union activity and collective bargaining help or hurt the economy. There is a view that labour institutions and progressive legislation are bad for business. This debate has been around for some time but gained prominence in the 1990s in both academic and policymaking circles as financial institutions tried to grapple with economic reforms in many crisis-riddled countries. The negative view about labour emerged as a cornerstone of the management of the international monetary system where the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for example, felt that domestic economic disequilibrium was caused by rigidities in resource markets. This bias was often found where the public sector occupied a large share of the product and labour markets. A return to a September 2007 article for the World Bank by Richard Freeman reminds us that the debate on this issue