Dear Editor,
“Meanwhile government announced that additional steps have also been initiated to address other pending anomalies in salaries being paid to other categories of employees including some teachers who are affected by inconsistencies in their pay grades, depending on the year in which they are appointed” – SN of September 24. One is not sure how much to sympathise with a President who seems either not to listen, or is not advised by adequately informed public servants. It may also be that the latter are not audacious enough to suggest his attendance to those constitutional provisions that allow for the effective functioning of the Teachers’ Service Commission, and perhaps more critically, the Public Service Commission. In the same breadth, like all his predecessors the President or his associates need desperately to converse with the representative Unions – Guyana Teachers’ Union and the Public Service Union. For from this perspective they are all at the same level of misinformation about compensation management in these services.
Immediately even the ‘Sweeper-Cleaners’ have the same complaint as ‘some teachers’ regarding ‘anomalies…. depending on the year in which they are appointed’. It is in fact a pandemic that has affected all employees of the aforementioned services ever since the infiltration of the systemof annual across-the-board increases’ decades ago. Those who know better identify the affliction as ‘BUNCHING’ – a subject that was substantively addressed in Dr. Harold Lutchman’s comprehensive Report from the Commission of Inquiry into the Public Service of 2016. BUNCHING – resulted from the abandonment of the well recognised principle and system of incremental awards based on well organised annual performance appraisals, with the latter process also identifying potential for succession (without extraneous affiliation). It consequently makes a nonsense of ‘pay grades’ (should read ‘salary scales’).
For obviously the annual increase on the minimum say, leaves the employee at a career minimum – a formula that applies wherever the employee has been appointed and operative for the last two decades at least. Again where it refers to ‘some teachers’, it must first of all, be those Head Teachers/Principals at the highest job grade whose salary is fixed in concrete, without any attempt since the colonial days to reward them for performance, moreso in these CSEC times of achievement. So that however coincidentally, the President has incited much needed attention by his colleagues and counterpart Unions towards the formulation of a most assertive group of specialists to creatively address the future of compensation management in the public services. In the process particular attention would have to be given to the perfunctory and discriminatory appointments by ‘Contract’ and related ‘Gratuity’ payments – most advantageous over being a ‘Permanent’ employee who undertakes the identical set of responsibilities.
Such explicit divisiveness in human resources management can hardly cumulate into the achievement of ‘onenesses’ so contradictorily espoused. What is discouraging is the implication that all the related parties appear not to know that they do not know – which is that budgeted salary scales are but ephemeral, and offer no incentive for required high performance – so much needed for ‘unified’ future development. In the meantime someone should research for a more (self) respectful descriptor than ‘Sweeper-Cleaner’.
Sincerely,
E.B. John
for Office Attendants
