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Govt. should provide educational incentives for crossover professionals – Patterson
Opposition Member of Parliament, David Patterson
Kaieteur News – The Government of Guyana should provide educational incentives for persons to transition from one profession to another, Opposition Member of Parliament (MP), David Patterson said. Patterson, at the Alliance for Change’s (AFC) press conference on Friday said that this is one avenue to help fight the oil companies mass recruitment of skilled professional workers.
Patterson was asked by a Kaieteur News reporter, “what are some strategies that you think can be put in place to prevent this [oil companies recruiting skilled workers], and is it a concern that if this trend continues, there would not be anyone left to develop the country in the different sectors?”
In response, the Opposition MP said, “They haven’t increased (salaries) 6.5% would definitely not help them retain all the skilled professionals that they have. They have not provided any incentives education wise for people to transition from one profession into the other we call them crossovers professionals. You may have studied say Tourism and you want to get into the oil and gas sector and you want a cushion. They have done none of that. All they have been doing is promoting low end skilled laborers.”
Patterson added, “This government since they have returned and even during the previous tenure have very scant regard for professional workers. I could recall when I was at the Ministry the salaries for the engineers and those things were abysmal. I had to go to cabinet to have a special (sitting) to ensure the salaries for engineers was raised on par with the private sector so that we could retain them. This government has not done anything to bolster that..they haven’t paid teachers.”
The AFC representative told reporters that the government continues to pump “a vast amount of money into the sugar industry”.
“They give great concessions into the hotelier… the Qatar hotel which will end up with low paying jobs so in the end and this is what we have been saying that in the end we will have a paucity of technical staff and they have already shown that they are willing to go and import workers from other countries instead of promotion Guyanese workers,” Patterson said.
Meanwhile, Leader of the Opposition, Aubrey Norton feels that the Government of Guyana (GoG) must offer competitive salaries to Guyanese to avoid losing its skilled labour force to the oil and gas sector.
Norton made this comment on Friday in response to questions posed by Kaieteur News on the subject.
Norton was keen to note that while he holds the view that professionals have a right to work in whichever industry they prefer, there are methods that can be implemented to ensure the skilled workers continue to provide service for the development of their country, rather than advance the profits of private organizations.
He explained that a key element to ensure the public sector is adequately managed is continuous training. “I said before at press conferences one of the failures of the government is that they are not training enough people to have the technical competence to deal with the oil and gas sector, that Guyana is now an oil and gas country, there should have been far more training so that you have a wider pool of persons to select from.”
Meanwhile, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo during his weekly conference on Thursday, hosted at the Office of the President, said that both the private sector and state agencies have complained about losing its employees to the rapidly developing sector.
Jagdeo was responding to a question from this newspaper when he noted that while the private sector has complained about losing its “people at the bottom” such as cleaners to the public sector since they receive better salaries, the government is losing its skilled workers to the petroleum sector.
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