The Public Service needs to be better served

Feb 16, 2021 Letters

Dear Editor,

Kaieteur News – There is so much talk – of reformation, transformation, even transfiguration – promises galore.
As a young man, my boss would warn: ‘if you can’t do the small things well, it is hard to convince that you can do the larger things any better’.
It is in this context of a more promising future that one wonders how the long-constipated structure of the Public Service will be relieved.
For more than two decades now, since its fourteen-grade job structure was implemented on the recommendations of an international team of consultants, Peat Marwick McLintock, in 1991, there has been no effort whatsoever by any boastful administration to attend to a fundamentally outdated compensation management regime.
It is not as if this egregious faultline has not been brought to the attention of various wise men but all have ignored the blatant reality of the technological changes that have progressively occurred and which commonsensically invite a substantive re-evaluation of jobs, which they have been impacted.
It leaves the more attentive to wonder how many parliamentarians actually read the volumes of budget documentation that every year show the irrationalities in the values of many jobs. Yet it is the underlying admission of the inherent inconsistencies that result in the contradiction of these employers contracting individuals of choice, and at very personal rates and benefits. So that the issue of grading jobs is discomfittingly ignored. In any case, there is no identifiable unit of competency for this critical activity.
The following table (Table 6.1) reflects examples of how befuddled the grading system can be:

But then the Health Services, with its progressive specialisations, always deserved ‘special attention’ – all the more needed to discourage these actors from migrating to the private sector. Space does not allow more than the following sample of comparabilities.
A significant percentage of the above are ‘contracted employees’ who are paid gratuity every six months at the rate of 22.5% of monthly salary, and in contradiction of their contracts, also enjoy annual increases as do their pensionable colleagues.
But more urgently anyhow their worth needs to be reviewed in these pandemic times, which appear to be inexorable.
A further admixture of confusion can be seen in the following sample of the Position of Director from Grades 14 to 9:

Related to Grades are of course scales, which however are not utilised, since the exercises of Performance Appraisal and the award of increments constitute a chimera unrealised for decades. There simply is no interest expressed in individual proficiency, making as a consequence, a profound nonsense of talk by the decision-makers about organisational productivity.
Indeed, their eloquent budgets continue to include simplistically, the position of Personnel Officer. They speak magnanimously to the theme of ‘human resources’ – blatantly contrasted with the following grades of Personnel Officers:
• Chief
• Principal
• Senior
• Officer II
• Officer I
a functional misconstruct singularly related to the Guyana Public Service and certainly not recognisable elsewhere in and outside of Guyana.
It is in this regard, amongst others, that a major organisational transfiguration is needed. How many scholarships in Human Resources Management are being offered?
The constipation indeed descends to the level of Tradesmen where there are new technologies to be taken into consideration.
The grouping by no means include the still prevalent ‘Clerk/Typist’ – in the absence of the unknown ‘Typewriter’.
But in the end, the Guyana Public Service can boast of one unbeatable record worldwide, and that is the maintenance of the earliest retirement age in the world – 55 years, proudly inherited from our colonial past; but not applicable to Parliamentarians who ignore the fact that it does not reconcile with age 60 years established by the NIS since 1969.
Yours truly,
E.B. John