Dear Editor,
One could not help but read intently the Accountability Watch article titled ‘Salary increases, contracted employees and the COI report’ (SN Oct. 10, 2016).
As someone who has consistently commented on the travesty perpetrated over the past decades of bypassing the constitutional authority of the Public Service Commission (which in itself was in a state of suspension for several years); and of the imposition of the practice of contracted employment obviously based on the Theory of Relativity (taking care of one’s relatives and friends), I feel compelled to add the following comments.
By their own indifference, or inability to harness the rampant abuse of the Constitution, the Opposition allowed the cancerous misconduct of the then administration to become so institutionalised that, wittingly or unwittingly, the new dispensation has continued to exploit the malpractice of contracting personnel into ‘the Public Service’.
Assuming the figures in the Table titled Summary of Staffing for 2016 is even close to accurate; what it reveals is a fundamental contradiction of the pretence at regularising an abnormality contained in the Terms of Reference of COI Report into the Public Service.
Notwithstanding the above, it is important to point out that the author’s eagerness to emphasise the thrust of his criticism, mistakenly included teachers and the police in the counting.
A careful check would however reveal that the latter are not ‘public servants’ in the strictest sense of the formal terminology. They fall squarely under the respective constitutional Agencies, viz, the Teaching Service Commission and the Police Service Commission.
The previous administration mischievously conjoined the latter with another independent constitutional Agency – the Public Service Commission, and integrated what should have been separate memberships.
It is critically important therefore that the misinterpretation contained in the published Article be apprehended, lest it bemuses teachers, police (and their relatives and friends) into thinking that they are indeed public servants.
The above having been said, there is no question that the confusion reigns amongst the decision-makers.
It should be no secret that the bypass of the Public Service Commission by individual Ministries who empowered themselves to negotiate their own values for the same job (e.g Accountant), when multiplied across the spectrum of Budget Agencies (which once included such constitutional entities like the Chambers of the Director of Public Prosecution, Guyana Elections Com-mission, Audit Office of Guyana) the cumulative effect is one of irretrievable chaos, suggesting that neither of the protagonists in the current flailing negotiations about pay increases for public servants quite understands.
There are just too many erratically structured pay packages which cannot possibly be regularised by a simplistic formula of increases.
In any case, careful scrutiny will reveal that current job comparabilities/differentials even within the traditional Public Service are not based on adequate technical evaluation methodologies, since what specialist evaluators there might have been over the decades were brazenly replaced by the politicians.
Incidentally, absolutely no one seems to have noticed that there has been included in the National Estimates for the longest years an entity registered under the Companies Act, namely the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation.
By an egregious sleight of hand this Corporation continues to be accepted on both sides of the parliamentary aisle as a Budget Agency, to which are assigned the traditional public service pay grades. In any other environment this fiction would be recognised, and appropriately derided.
The stark fact is that in fair recognition of all the specialist medical skills required, all incumbents of such positions are ‘contracted employees’ of the GPHC.
So what! At the other end of the employment spectrum it is no secret that an unseemly proportion of drivers of public service vehicles are also ‘contracted employees’.
So that whatever corrections may have to be made to the Table mentioned earlier, this submission contends that the anomaly of ‘contracted employment’ is substantively a litigious matter. In other words the contract cannot be terminated unilaterally.
From this perspective it is arguable that lucrative as the contract may be, the beneficiary would insist on mutually agreed terms of termination, taking into account the particular benefit of gratuity accruing every six months, calculated at 22.5% of inflated salaries.
When the incidence of thousands of contracts is taken into consideration it will be recognised that only a group of robustly knowledgeable decision-makers would be able to bite the individual bullet.
But even given that such capacity exists, there is still a most fundamental question to be answered – which is, how to establish correctly a credible hierarchy of relative values of jobs. This promises to be a stupendous undertaking which, to its credit, that COI Report recognises.
In the final analysis the extant construct has in a sense developed into a compulsive legitimacy of its own, given the substantial scarcity of critical skills and competencies needed in ‘knowledge – based’ institutions everywhere.
The millennial generation is not disposed to pensionable careers. Competition increasingly incites a disposition for mobility which cannot be easily contained, especially in the more over-arching context of economic, political and sociological uncertainties locally, regionally and even globally.
Boat gone a fall.
There is therefore the urgent need for a knowledgeable group of human resources practitioners to brainstorm the development of a new adaptable construct to address the existing organisational vulnerabilities.
But perhaps the ultimate irony emerging from the current scenario is that of the growing number of veterans being contracted – in palpable contradistinction of legitimate public servants being still pensionable at age 55 years.
Yours faithfully,
E.B. John
