Immediately on his assumption to office in May 2015 President David Granger signalled his concern that the quality of the service delivered by the Guyana Public Service be enhanced to better match the national need by setting up a Com-mission of Inquiry (CoI) into the Public Service of Guyana. The CoI was also tasked with proffering such recommendations as it deemed necessary for remedying such shortcomings as it found.
The issue of inadequate pay levels in the Public Service having long been felt to be inextricably linked to its underperformance, the announcement that there was to be a Commission of Inquiry had triggered a certain level of public expectation that the probe would address, substantively, the issue of wage and salary increases. The Commission, however, hastened to douse that expectation, cautioning that it was not intended to serve as a “Wages and Salaries Commission.” It also made the point that its terms of reference did not require that it “be involved in the award of salary increases and other benefits to Public Servants.”
That intervention, however, did little to extinguish the hope that the report of the CoI would coincide with at least some positive recommendation regarding a significant upward adjustment of public servants’ salaries. What the CoI’s disclaimer also failed to do was to restrain some witnesses at the hearings (mostly public servants) from making vigorous pitches for significant wage and salary increases as a prerequisite for the improvement in the quality of the Public Service, the search for that improvement being the primary objective of the work of the CoI, in the first place.
All of that notwithstanding, it is probably fair to say that the CoI did its best to anchor its work against the issues which it believed had constituted the essence of its mandate, those being recruitment, training and conditions of service, without appearing to be indifferent to the evidence that it was receiving about the wages and salaries issue.
After the conclusion of the Public Service CoI came the historic 2016 wages and salaries negotiations between the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) and the Government of Guyana; historic because the negotiations marked a significant departure from the modest handouts to which public servants had, for years been accustomed. As it happened those wages and salaries negotiations failed to bring an end to the longstanding issue of inadequate Public Service pay, the eventual ‘offer’ by the Government of Guyana having been openly frowned upon by the GPSU even though it was never really in a position to vigorously oppose the actual payout.
In sum, neither the Public Service CoI nor the 2016 wages and salaries negotiations succeeded in coming even close to resolving the age old issue of public servants’ pay and the nexus between reward and performance. The Guyana Public Service Union has, up until now, appeared to accept resignedly its failure to realize a pay increase anywhere close to its reported 40 per cent across-the-board pay rise expectation, the government having made clear its position that a public servants’ pay increase beyond that which it offered at the negotiating table was simply unaffordable. The point should be made as well that while the Guyana Public Service Union still holds to the position that the wages and salaries negotiations are incomplete and that the 2016 year-end payout was being treated as an “interim payment,” there is still no indication as to when those negotiations will resume; that apart, what is certain at this stage is that there is unlikely to be any further increase in public servants’ pay beyond what has already been offered and accepted.
The CoI may be perfectly in order in its assertion that it was not intended to be a “Wages and Salaries Commission”, though that assertion did not necessarily relieve it entirely of a responsibility to make the point regarding the nexus between pay and performance. The government, for its part, as the outcome of the 2016 wages and salaries negotiations illustrated, made a pay offer based on what is loosely described as affordability. With more than seven months having elapsed since the handing over of the Report of the CoI to President Granger the issue of the next phase of the process of Public Service reform arises. One makes this point mindful of the fact that there are, at this time, quite a few reports of CoIs, the recommendations of which are still to be addressed by government.
What makes the recommendations of the Public Service CoI urgent, however, is that their early consideration by government offers the best immediately available opportunity for initiating the transformation which our Public Service, in its present condition, so desperately needs. There is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by delaying any further serious official consideration of the recommendations contained in the Report.
