Political analyst Freddie Kissoon yesterday accused the former PPP/C administration of utilising contract workers to engineer the ethnic transformation of the public service in Guyana.
Testifying before the ongoing Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the Public Service, Kissoon based his assertion on the results of his thesis, “Ethics, Power and Ideological Racism: Comparing Presidencies in Guyana.” Kissoon explained that in his research, which was conducted towards the completion of a Master’s in Guyanese History, he chose to focus on racism in the exercise of power and he was able to capture ethnic engineering in the appointment of Permanent Secretaries in “graphic, statistical and factual ways.”
“98% of those contract workers were East Indian,” Kissoon told commissioners Professor Harold Lutchman, Samuel Goolsarran and Sandra Jones, before adding that he believed “the contract worker mechanism was a political mechanism used by the former government to ensure a pronounced presence of people with authority in the public service that were of the same ethnic commonality [as the government]. Therefore, the contract employees [originated from] more of a need to have a strategic advantage in the public service rather the pursuit of skills.”
Asked to suggest a way forward for the public service, Kissoon declared that “there has to be a mechanism to insulate the public service from changing governments and from a strong cabinet and a strong presidency.”
He called for the composition of the public service commission and the police service commission to be removed from the prerogative of the presidency or the relevant ministry.
“I would like to see stakeholders sit on that body who don’t have political allegiance or were not appointed by politicians,” Kissoon said.
At several points during Kissoon’s presentation, he was asked by the Chairman and Commissioner Jones to clarify how this political independence may be achieved. “You have provided great problem analysis but we want to look ahead now. How do you propose we get this re-engineering process going? Where do we start? How do we start?” Jones asked.
Kissoon, who had by this time spoken for more than an hour, promised to provide the commission with written recommendations.
‘Parallel public service’
Also testifying on the impact of contract workers was consumer advocate Leonard Craig.
Craig, who has a Master’s Degree in Labour Economics, told the commissioners that there is “no need for a parallel public service” and he charged that its existence is actually destroying the public service in Guyana.
He said that the present system of prolonged tenure for contracted workers is not necessary as there should be sufficient information after a year to know whether that person should be placed within the fixed establishment.
He further noted that the present structure is actually a creative way to destroy the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) and trade unions.
“Many public service contracts state that the public servant is responsible for paying their own NIS and taxes. Quite often, they don’t show up at NIS and the NIS system is not so geared to capture every contract that is created,” he said, while adding that public servants who are given contracts are “treated like a businessperson selling their services to the government, so the government is not responsible whether the person pays taxes or not.”
As a result, Craig argued that the pervasiveness of contract workers, whom he said comprise as much as 80% of staff in some ministries, has helped to destroy the contribution level of the NIS.
Craig is also of the belief that changes in the structure of the public service have precipitated a weakening of the trade union system.
According to him, contracts allow people to opt out of being part of the unions. This coupled with the creation of new agencies, which are quite often not unionised, has led to a decrease in union density.
“When you calculate the union density (number of workers unionised versus the total stock of workers), you will find that it is decreasing over the years. There is a nose dive in union density, which is killing off the militancy of Guyanese people and allowing these kinds of creeping dictatorships in the public service,” he said.
“Unions have a special place in ensuring that the public service remains professional so if we introduce contract workers which are far removed from them that instrument of keeping government in check will be weakened,” he added.
