President David Granger says that whether or not the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) agrees with the offer, his government will be paying public servants a differentiated wage hike ranging from 10% at the lowest scale to 1% at the highest
Asked on this week’s Public Interest television programme if his government is prepared to make an arbitrary award if the GPSU General Council which meets today rejects the offer, the president said “the award we proposed is as much as we can do as of the first of September and we intend to proceed with that.”
He maintained that the offer is “perhaps what is affordable at present” and encouraged the union to continue to negotiate with his government to settle other issues such as debunching and allowances which are still to be decided.
In its 2015 manifesto, the APNU+AFC government had promised substantial wage increases to public servants however the head of state said yesterday that they had not anticipated the “size of the indebtedness” of several government agencies.
“When we went into office in May last year we did not anticipate the size of indebtedness of GuySuCo whose bailout has been $10B a year. We have also seen a fall in commodity prices worldwide; bauxite, gold, timber which have affected our revenues. We have also not been able to find sufficient funding for other social services such as the University of Guyana, the school system and also the health services. We did try to move old age pension up a bit. The social sector has taken quite a bit of our money,” Granger said.
He further maintained that his government has done “everything that was possible.” “We entered into negotiations in good faith and we haven’t discontinued negotiations but that is the last offer we put on the table because we have to prepare next year’s budget. We have to tidy up this business before the last quarter,” he explained before concluding that the differentiated increase “is our latest financial offer. We are prepared to proceed on that …but we would like to continue to engage the union for the rest of this year and ensure that we have an outcome in 2017 which is satisfactory to both sides.”
