00:00Human Rights Attorney at Law Renako Gregg says while there might be opportunities such
00:05as free education available to all citizens, not all citizens are positioned to be able
00:10to make use of these opportunities in the same way. He points to groups who are stymied
00:14in various ways, including a lack of economic resources and disabilities.
00:19The state, past governments, whatever they can say, but how you can say we are not upholding
00:23social justice principles, you see people going right through, you know, up to free
00:29education and they don't have to pay for that and nobody in going hungry if you know they
00:35could access different things. But if we are committed to a true sense of social justice,
00:42it would mean transforming things to ensure that you do not have people living on the
00:50margins and to the extent that they do.
00:53Gregg says the issue will not be resolved unless leaders take charge and engage people
00:57in a way where social justice will be at the core of the discussions. As for the raise
01:01of pay for parliamentarians and other public officials, stemming from the government's
01:06acceptance of the 120th report of the Salaries Review Commission.
01:11They were looking at the work that they did and they say yes, based on this, based on
01:15that, you know, there should be an increase and, you know, there's all of this analysis
01:20justifying and I actually don't have a problem with that. You reached that conclusion and
01:24you say this is how much you're going to make. But what does it mean that you're not doing
01:29that for everybody else? Right. What does it mean that we have in our constitution this
01:35notion of resources being distributed for the common good? When you have such great
01:43discrepancies between the haves and the have nots in our society, you are not upholding
01:48the principles of social justice.
01:50Chairman of the Youth Arm of the Movement for Social Justice, Renisha Samuel, says people
01:55on the minimum wage have to work an hour to purchase a bread, but she believes the mass
01:59population has been eased into accepting this over the years.
02:04They have slowly been tightening our corset. They like to call it a corset. They're slowly
02:08tightening it. And so I feel like as a mass people, we're not realizing that we can't
02:13breathe. Our face starting to turn blue and they're not showing us the mirror for us to
02:17see how we're looking in this position. And so I would say yes, to an extent, the masses
02:23have gotten comfortable. The masses have fallen asleep. And I can only hope and pray that
02:29if not the generation that was the generation that is coming, which is my generation, we
02:34decide that we're not fitting into this corset no more and we're changing it up.
02:38They call for a holistic approach, including a proper re-evaluation of different jobs and
02:44a tiered system of taxation where those with more pay more. Meanwhile, Samuel expresses
02:50her view that raising the minimum wage is a good place to start. Alicia Boucher, TV6 News.
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