We can probably anticipate an animated reply from the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) to the forthright comment made by Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) President Vishnu Doerga on the 10 per cent salary increase in public servants salaries offered by the Government of Guyana and which the union says it rejects. The essence of Mr Doerga’s argument is that when you crunch the numbers the economy has not earned a 10 per cent salary increase for public servants and that if the matter were to be judged from a strictly private sector perspective no such increase was likely to have been granted. In that regard, Doerga implies, public servants should count themselves fortunate.
GPSU President Patrick Yarde appears to be ‘all set to go,’ so to speak in response to what Mr Doerga has had to say in much the same way that the long-serving union leader has taken on first, Finance Minister Winston Jordan then Business Minister Dominic Gaskin on the issue.
Perhaps a point that should be made early in the piece is that the GPSU having written to the Ministry of Social Protection to ask that itself and the government now engage in a conciliatory exercise in the light of the union’s rejection of the government’s offer, these interventions, whether they be by ministers of government or private sector officials might well be seen by the union as premature and counterproductive ones that might have the effect of ‘colouring’ an as yet unfinished process. Recently, Mr Yarde made what many might regard as a valid point when he asserted that the public discourse on the matter, not least the ministerial – and now the private sector – interventions could well create a feeling in the public mind that the negotiations, which are still ongoing, have long been done and dusted and that there is simply no coming back to, re-negotiating, if you will, the 10 per cent offer.
The government and the union have been engaged in a not too delicate dance on the matter of the salary increases. The former’s announcement that it would make the ten per cent payout in October not only seeks to send a message of finality as far as the offer is concerned but also takes account of what it believes is a half-a-loaf-is-better-than-none mindset of the public servants. Truth be told, not too many people believe that public servants are about to ‘close down’ the country over the disparity between the offer and whatever it is that the union says it wants.
For his part, Yarde has sought to nullify the likely feeling of finality that the government might seek to extract from the October month-end payout by telling public servants to accept the ten per cent as a sort of up-front payment on a larger amount.
The problem here is that we are once again stuck in an arrangement that is counterproductive for both public servants and for the country as a whole since, whatever the positions taken by Messrs Jordan, Gaskin and Doerga the bottom line is that public servants’ wages and salaries are meagre enough to create some very basic and fundamental pressures which, not only compromise the quality of their lives but the quality of their work. And there is evidence that that is just what is happening.
Frankly, there is nothing particularly ingenious in speculating about what constitutes a living wage and just what constitutes an acceptable standard of living. Whatever we get paid cannot constitute a living wage if it does not stretch sufficiently far to properly nourish ourselves and our families and pay our routine bills and present ourselves publicly and for work in a manner that is presentable. Some public servants, many public servants, are deficient in their ability to meet those requirements. Where the rubber hits the road, of course, is when we arrive at the point where ministers and senior officials find themselves demanding a higher quality of work from public servants who are manifestly not sufficiently incentivized to produce to the level that is expected of them.
That is why, unfortunately, whenever issues like affordability arise in matters to do with just what is an acceptable level of salary increase for public servants, public servants themselves and a large section of the public tend to be less concerned about ‘what the economy can afford’ and more preoccupied with the gap between the lifestyles of public servants and those of ministers of government, the latter being far better incentivized for their efforts.
It is the same with the private sector. When the argument is made for what the country or the economy can afford as a suitable salary level for public servants does the analysis ever take account of the impact of an under-incentivized public service on the efficiency and the profits – the bottom line, to put it bluntly, of the business sector? So that however suave and sophisticated the articulation may sound, the reality frequently goes much deeper than is apparent on the surface.
