Latest update November 8th, 2024 1:00 AM
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Five percent for public servants, huge increments for the fat cats
Dear Editor
The importance of having a competent, tenured and professional public workforce for effective national development is vitally important for the success of any country. Thus the PPP strategy of marginalizing and underpaying public servants, be they nurses, teachers, soldiers, policemen, sugar workers or office workers is criminal at minimum since at the other end of that pay cheque are children to feed. But this same PPP Government found it as an acceptable public policy to continue a program of hiring mainly Freedom House operatives on contracts at multiple of their net salary worth and then have the audacity to say that the Treasury cannot afford more than 5 percent. I really wonder where these people learnt their economics.
This wages policy of giving the traditional public servant 5 percent increments while offering up to the FAT CATS, salaries of hundreds of thousands of dollars is anti-human, and very imperialism at its very best. It is purely insane to have a Freedom House Secretary Ms. Chitrekha Dass securing a salary of some G$3 million a year payable from the Office of the President. However Nurse Sago can only take home 22 percent of that amount (under G$700,000 per year) although she is more qualified and offers much more value for money to the people of Guyana. The PPP has broken the system.
This PPP policy is all about self-enrichment of PPP stooges; not development of the country.
For this reason, the effectiveness and efficiency of policies in public sector institutions will continue to fail as the impact of government actions in all areas where it intervenes, will remained crippled.
In human resource management (HRM) the basics as outlined by Professor Reid, remains – employers must attract and retain human capital; employers must have a depoliticized and meritocratic public workforce; and employers must ensure that staff focuses their efforts on achieving the policy and program objectives of their institutions. If one is to consider the HRM policy of the Ramotar administration, it has failed on all fronts with its 5 percent wages increase policy. To add salt to injury, this policy of invading the public service with Freedom House appointed contract workers is anti-working class and is being implemented by a political party that tries to brand itself as a working class party. What a joke!
The IMF through its Article IV Reports that wages bill as a percentage of GDP in 2011 in CARICOM countries in Guyana is very low compared to others. So why this 5 percent story again? From the graph below – in 2011, the Guyanese wages bill was 6.1 percent of GDP and was the lowest in CARICOM save and except for Trinidad where the size of that economy is significantly larger because of the oil industry compared to the rest of CARICOM. In St Vincent, some 12.3 percent of the budget is spent on workers’ wages. This empirical evidence does prove there is significant room for expansion in the Guyanese workers’ wages and it can be afforded. So much for the economic management of the economy by three wise men of the PPP. They continue to embarrass the President with their deception, untruths and mis-advice. There are more than enough funds in the Treasury according to the 2013 Budget to funnel 10 percent into the workers’ wages as a pre-condition to negotiations in the collective bargaining process with the Unions.
Source: Compilation from Article IV Consultation Reports – IMF
The AFC being a responsible political party, after considering inflation and the mess in which the PPP has placed the economy, continues to call for an immediate 10 percent wages increase subject to further negotiations through the collective bargaining arrangements with the unions. This is not an irrational position, this is not even a political position; this is position of basic humanity and compassion for one’s people.
I am personally appealing to President Ramotar – as a former union man, you are expected to have more compassion and rationality to make a humane decision for the workers. This Jagdeo thing of five percent cannot wuk’. Stop being a Jagdeo puppet and be your own man. Let us start the ball rolling at 10 percent.
Sasenarine Singh
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