Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) President Patrick Yarde yesterday said that the union’s executive council will decide on the way forward on public service salary negotiations by the end of this week, while maintaining that its demand for a 25% increase is both feasible and sustainable.
Yarde yesterday defended the demand even as the union criticised Finance Minister Winston Jordan’s claim that anything more that the administration’s “final offer” of increases ranging from 10% to 1% cannot be “sustained” by the country’s revenue projections.
Yarde told Stabroek News that the union’s executive council will meet on Friday to decide the way forward on salary negotiations.
Asked why this was not done before, he noted that a “final offer” does not necessarily mean deadlock. “We wrote rejecting the offer and requesting a meeting.
That meeting occurred on Wednesday. On the agenda was the status of the wages negotiation and the meeting resulted in no movement.
It is now the negotiating team’s view that a deadlock exists and as such we will look to one of our constitutional bodies [the executive council] to decide the way forward, whether it be conciliation or arbitration,” he explained.
The union, which has been mostly silent since rejecting the government’s offer, yesterday also issued a statement in which it called for Jordan to be “counselled to desist from pronouncements that do no more than pollute the prevailing environment,” in light of his most recent statements.
Jordan on Friday said that a larger increase would be unsustainable. “Every increase we make must be sustained for the next year and the next year… sustained payments that have implications for allowances and pensions have to come from growth in revenues that can be sustained,” he said.
Jordan added that though it is recognised that public servants need salary increases at the level being asked for by the union, that can only happen as the “cake grows larger and larger and larger.”
“It may well be that the minister may regard it as his prerogative to periodically make such reckless and ill-conceived comments about public servants’ pay though a stage has surely been reached where what he has to say will not only compromise the ongoing negotiations and further frustrate the country’s public servants, but may also, in the final analysis, have a deleterious effect on the longer-term effectiveness of the Public Service as a whole and by extension on the development of the country,” the union, however, responded yesterday.
In its statement, the GPSU noted its mounting concern at what it described as Jordan’s perpetuation of a posture of seeming hostility to the very idea of a living wage for public servants.
The union challenged the claim that the government’s offer is what is affordable and sustainable, while stating that its own ongoing investigations “seriously challenge” the validity of the minister’s claims.
It further noted that the minister has failed to state that requests made to him by the union for official information that calls into question his “affordability” claim are yet to be provided.
Yarde told Stabroek News yesterday that he is convinced that the 25% increase being requested of the government “is both feasible and sustainable.”
He is convinced of this despite the fact that the union participated in two months of negotiations without information on government revenue and expenditure.
This information, which was promised and never delivered, is expected to afford the union the opportunity to see in which areas monies have been allocated as well as show discrepancies, such as discrimination in pay.
Yarde reiterated the position expressed in the statement that the union does not believe that the minister’s posture is in line with the professed position of the political administration in its campaign commitment to meaningfully improve the standard of living of public servants nor is it consistent with what he practices for those who work closest to him.
“It is a harsh irony that Minister Jordan appears indifferent to the importance of better pay for all categories of Public Servants in circumstances where quite a few contracted employees at the Ministry for which he has Cabinet responsibility enjoy ‘super’ salaries,” the statement said, while adding that it might be asked whether Jordan “advocates, indeed, seeks to further institutionalise, a Public Service of ‘haves and have nots?”
The statement also noted the union’s concern with the fact that Minister Jordan appears to take it for granted that the “sustainability” of the public service can somehow be sustained despite the “meagerness” of public servants’ emolument.
“His line of reasoning would appear to be that whatever crumbs are thrown in their direction, public servants will simply soldier on, regardless. That, in the union’s view amounts to taking public servants and their families entirely for granted and putting the future of the nation at risk,” it said.
Of particular concern, according to the union, is the “clear fixation” by Minister Jordan with interventions in the ongoing wages, salaries and allowances negotiations in a manner that is transparently designed to compromise the negotiations and to frustrate the efforts of public servants to rise above their present difficult circumstances. “Indeed, we are aware that public servants across the public service take issue with what has become his counterproductive and, we believe, potentially damaging interventions in the negotiations,” the union added.
