Dear Editor,
Up to the elections of May 11, 2015 the published basic salaries of parliamentarians were as follows:
Any but the obdurate can quickly recognise the disparity in relative values, specifically in the levels of responsibility and decision-making which inhere.
Their counterparts will note the same and argue a case for reasonable adjustments. The latter anticipates a very fundamental method of job evaluation born out of the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. It is called the Decision Band Method to be found in the most recent text that specialises in various forms of designing compensation structures.
Hopefully leaders accepting this basis for job evaluation would agree even from a distance, that the relativities in the above table are clearly erratic and need to be adjusted.
What is perturbing is when one refers to the national estimates and notes those public service positions whose respective value advantageously compares with those listed in the Table. To note: all of them take decisions from a minister.
Without adverting to the actual amounts, be assured that in the following comparator Table the public service positions listed each has a maximum of scales higher than the static salary of the parliamentarians shown. (In the meantime remember that if they are contracted employees then there is no consistent maximum applied to the same position by the employing ministries, except that most had to be cleared by the Office of the President.)
The following sample Table quotes the public service figures of 2013 as against 2015 National Assembly figures.
Please take careful note that the above are samples extracted from authentic documentation. However only the public service numbers are dated at 2013 while the others are dated 2015. All this means that so far as the public service values are concerned the relativities would have since been expanded by the grants of across-the-board increases since 2013.
Allowing that there are still those who would consider a substantial adjustment in the light of the massive and almost impenetrable challenges which the least optimistic would have expected to be unearthed, it has to be conceded that what should have been experienced by a new administration as a reasonable transition with normal earthquake tremors turned out to be one of tsunamic proportions.
Even for the best of analysts decision-making will be very demanding in the foreseeable future. One example of a possible earthquake is embedded in GuySuCo. Meanwhile the border controversy with Venezuela can reach volcanic proportions.
Incidentally for those auditors who would monitor and argue cost effectiveness, the samples of the growth of contracted employees (not necessary competency and skills) over a five year period from 2009-2014 are as follows:
Contracted Employees
The above facts are mostly extracted from the various national budgets much of which are hardly actually read by the very parliamentarians who manage to convince one another with their respective obfuscations.
The question for the citizenry is now what would they have done if placed in a particularly misfitting pair of shoes inherited by mostly barefooted soldiers (no pun on the President).
Yours faithfully,
E B John
