The wages’ tug-o-war can only end with the payment of a living wage

Nov 20, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – Guyana is the fastest growing economy in the world. So says the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU). But despite this fact, the government could only muster a meagre seven percent increase in wages for public servants for this year.
The unions representing public servants and teachers are perceived as having an anti-government agenda. In that context, it was always expected that they would have protested whatever the government offered.
All of our governments, however, continue to make the same mistake. They insist each year on offering annual increases instead of taking the bold step of establishing a target which they need to approach through incremental annual salary increases.
Instead of offering annual percentage increases, the government should commission the Bureau of Statistics to establish what is known as a living wage. The International Labour Organization (ILO) considers a living wage as one that is “sufficient to maintain, in the circumstances of each country, an adequate standard of life.”
A living wage is not a gift from government. It is a human right so accorded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That document expressly states that: “Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity”. This is also the basis for defining a living wage – remuneration which is sufficient to offer a decent and dignified existence.
While the definition of a living wage is imprecise, international labour standards have sought over time to narrow down the essentials of a living wage, and these can be used to establish a baseline living wage which is then adjusted each year.
The ILO for example proposed that the living wage include the cost of basic necessities, the cost of basic housing with amenities including decent housing and water, the cost of transportation, children’s education, health care, child care and with a small margin to cater for unforeseen circumstances.
The objective of the government should be to seek to set a deadline by which it hopes to have a convergence between the living wage and the country’s minimum wage. The minimum wage is deemed the minimum needed to ensure a dignified well-being of workers.
Once the living wage is set, the government can indicate that within five years, the country’s minimum wage will be at this level, instead of each year having to stretch incredulity by always having to defend the paltry sums it offers to workers.
The government is denying that it promised a 50 percent increase for public servants. However, during the election campaign notices with the PPP/C logo on it had been placed along a major road in the city, indicating that public servants would have been paid 50 percent increase. It is hard to imagine why any malicious grouping would have wanted to put up such notices, in the name of the PPP/C without that party’s consent and why none of the party’s leaders had ever objected to those notices.
A promise to pay a 50 percent increase, however, does not amount to paying it at one go. The 50 percent could well have been a target to be realised by 2025. There are still four more years to go. The PPP/C had also promised to raise pensions to $40,000 but this was clearly understood to mean that pensions would reach this level by 2025 and not immediately.
The government can immediately offer a 20 percent increase in the hourly public service wage rate without costing the Treasury a cent. At present, the average non-essential public servant works five days a week for a total of 40 hours.
If the work week is reduced to four days and to 32 hours, the average hourly wage would have increased by 20 percent without costing a blind cent to the Treasury. But the government is not brave enough and the unions are not daring enough to propose reducing the work week to four days which would give workers more time to do the many personal errands which they usually steal time from work to do.
The unions and government will constantly be in a squabble over wages. But other demands need to be placed on the table, including shortening the work week, flexible work hours, remote working and maternity leave with pay for both men and women.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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