It was always likely that the negotiations between the government and the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) over increases in public servants’ wages, salaries and allowances might, at some stage, hit hurdles and that is exactly what now appears to be the case. Watchers of the talks might even be inclined to apply the term deadlock in describing the status of the talks given the yawning gap between what we are told the union had been seeking (a 25 per cent increase across-the-board) and what the government is offering, namely, increases ranging from 10% at the lowest scale to 1% at the highest.
There is, unquestionably, a persuasive case for heeding the long-standing public service clamour for better pay, and up to earlier this week the view among public servants appeared to be that the government’s pay officer is not exactly dripping with generosity not does it come even close to compensating for the years of paltry, un-negotiated annual pay raises. Beyond that, of course, the issue of public servants’ salaries had become grotesquely disfigured through the destruction of any semblance of consistency in pay scales on account of the arbitrary implementation of devices like contract employment, ‘special salaries’ and other ugly political interventions designed, for one reason or another, to favour the beneficiaries. Simply put, public servants’ pay became fashioned into a political football.
After the APNU+AFC administration had chosen, late last year, to raise its ministers’ salaries ahead of those of public servants it placed itself in a position where, sooner rather than later, it would have to grasp the long-standing nettle of public servants pay.
If there continues to be a good deal of bellyaching over the service delivery standards in some public service institutions, there had arisen, over time, a sort of you-get-what-you-pay-for line response coming from other quarters. Frankly, there are areas of the public service where grossly inadequate pay levels are the most likely cause of a prevailing dearth of skills and this, over the years, has not been an issue that has attracted anywhere near sufficient official attention.
The current negotiations, of course, are unfolding against a backdrop that includes the outcomes of the Lutchman Commission of Inquiry Report which made no secret of what it felt ought to be a nexus between expectations of higher performance levels in the public service and better pay. At the same time there was also Finance Minister Winston Jordan’s arguably indelicate intervention seeking to ‘caution’ against exalted pay increase expectations which was widely believed to be government’s real opening gambit in the pay negotiations.
The posture of the GPSU sends an unmistakable signal that it sees the government’s pay increase offer as inadequate from the standpoint of raising the standard of living of many of its members beyond what it has frequently described as ‘the employed poor.’ In addition, it also indicates that what is on the table falls well short of the level of incentive that can be expected to galvanize public servants into seriously raising their levels of performance, which is what the government says it wants.
As things stand, it appears that rather than having moved in the direction of any real progress the negotiations, so far, seem set to slip into what could be an icy phase. Beyond wages and salaries, the GPSU has already said that it considers the negotiations incomplete, since issues like de-bunching and responsibility-related allowances are yet to be dealt with.
If the union is yet to give a formal response to the government’s pay offer, its disposition is clearly written all over its posture. By last weekend it had announced that it would convene a meeting of its General Council after which it would pronounce on the pay offer. Probably more significant was the union’s weekend advertisement in sections of the media (‘Public Servants Alert!’) which effectively tosses the government’s pay increase offer into the court of the public servants themselves, confident, it seems that what the government has put on the table will not receive a hospitable response there. Storm clouds might well be gathering over the public service pay talks.
