CONTEXTUALIZING & UPDATING JOB CATEGORIZATION, COMPENSATION SYSTEMS

Nov 03, 2017 Letters

Dear Editor,
There have been many comments in the media recently about issues relating to the appropriateness of current systems of categorization, classification and compensation especially in the Public Sector (but from my experience, the Private Sector is not immune from similar misconceptions).
The latest has been a focus on “transitioning some 4000 ‘contracted employees’ into the regular public service” (ref. lengthy letter in SN of 31/10/17). My own reading, research and experience in the wider general question of job and employee categorization, classification and compensation influence me to caution against wholesale or indiscriminate ‘transitioning’, especially if the established system is anachronistic or suffers from understandable obsolescence given the increasing availability of new technologies in the STEMS, IT, ORGANIZATIONAL and HUMAN BEHAVIORIAL arenas.
For example:
· The lead article in the May 2017 “PEOPLE MANAGEMENT” monthly magazine of the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel Development) carried the bold title: “Within 12 years, half the workforce will be freelance”, and warned that the biggest challenge & opportunity for Human Resource Management professionals is the shift from traditional, regular full-time employment. The publication explained how the use of contingent workers demonstrates “the increasingly fluid boundaries between different forms of non-traditional employment, and the under-reported shifts taking place in the labor market….in short, the future is impermanent”.
· ‘UPWORK’, perhaps the largest provider of non-traditional employees (more than US$ Ibn worth of assignments in the USA) says that in the US, one in three workers is now freelance……a figure it says could hit 50% by 2020.
· A DELOITTE study of multi-nationals found that around a third of their workforces are contingent with many projecting increases in the future.
· Furthermore, “going to work” does not necessarily mean travelling from home to Office or Factory as, increasingly, people are working from home at their own pace and delivering substantively in real-time via IT.
The potential privatization of the commanding heights of our economy and the advent of multi-nationals like ExxonMobil et al cannot be ignored; nor should we discount the need to update and upscale our public services.
Anyone who thinks that Guyana is insulated from these winds of change must quickly shift gears out of their obsolescent, pedestrian comfort zone.
Nowrang Persaud

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