Teachers, nurses and police should be given special attention

Oct 29, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Teachers, nurses, and police ranks need to be treated differently from the rest of the public service. These three sectors – education, health and security – should be given the highest priority when it comes to salaries.
Guyana is probably the only country in the world where workers expect wage increases every year. This has to do with the high levels of inflation of the past, when workers’ earnings were eroded by the increases in prices. As such, governments came under intense pressure to pay salary increases every year. This is now a norm.
Public servants deserve not just increases in wages. They deserve a living wage. The problem is that the government’s spending is so excessive that a living wage cannot be paid at present.
But this does not mean that the government should not create a living wage index and then link annual wage increases to progression towards a living wage. For example, if a living wage for the lowest paid worker is set at $100,000 but the government can only afford $60,000 at this time, it has to show how increases in annual wages over the next five years will eventually converge towards the living wage.
The government is bamboozling public service workers. The government is offering public servants at the lower end of the pyramid an 8% increase, and then using a reducing sliding scale for those earning higher salaries. But yet when you work out the increase in absolute terms, those at the top are still receiving a higher increase than those at the bottom. This is the absurdity of the whole situation.
But despite this, when the government announces 8% for workers at the bottom, these workers get excited and will not strike, because this is about the highest percentage increase they would have received for a long time, even though they are still not earning a living wage and those above them are carrying home a higher back pay.
The second problem is the practice of applying the salary brush evenly across all types of workers. Teachers, nurses and police should be given special attention, because the bulk of the country’s resources should, right now, be channeled into education, health and security. Teachers should not be paid the same percentage increase as public servants. They deserve a living wage before anyone else.
No trained teacher should be earning less than $150,000 per month gross. No police constable should be receiving less than $100,000 per month. You cannot ask police to be effective in fighting crime when they are paid ‘chicken feed’ salaries. No nurse should be earning less than $100,000.
If the government cannot afford to pay a living wage immediately, it should freeze salary increases for all public servants, except teachers, nurses and the police, and put the 3.5 billion dollars towards paying a living wage to these three categories. The other public servants can be compensated for inflation.
The government has the money to pay a living wage to teachers, nurses and the police. The government is wasting a lot of money. It had to find, for example, $750 million to pay persons who were owed money for the controversial D’Urban Park Project. The money was found.
The money can be found to pay teachers, nurses and police a living wage. The average number of working days per year is around 240, since most people do not work on Saturdays and Sundays. The government, this year, is expected to spend around 250 billion dollars, which is more than 1 billion dollars per working day. Do you believe that the Guyanese people are receiving one billion dollars worth of service each day from the government bureaucracy?
The money is there to pay teachers, nurses and police, but there has to be a policy of reducing expenditure in other areas if a living wage for these three categories is to be sustained.
The teachers have been threatening strike action, but quite frankly, the government is not afraid of strike action, since it knows that workers, with all the bills they have to pay each month, cannot sustain strike action. And so the workers will have to live with the 8% increase at the bottom of the scale.
Incidentally, this 8% works out to around $4400 per month or less than $220 per working day. The cost of a half-litre bottle of soda is $280. The lowest paid workers cannot even quench their thirst with the 8% increase. This is the absurdity of using a sliding scale increase for wages without a living wage as a base.

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