The setting up by the David Granger administration of a Commission on Inquiry into the Public Service and the government’s subsequent agreement to engage the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) in talks on Public Servants’ wages, salaries and conditions of service amounted to important breakthroughs for the Public Service given the unwholesome condition in which it had found itself for decades. The two developments were meant to send a signal that government was keen to tackle some of the long-standing issues – particularly those relating to pay and conditions of service ‒ affecting public servants, as well as the failure of the Public Service to attract highly qualified persons, (save and except on lucrative contracts) low morale and attendant underperformance on account of too little incentive.
The Public Service CoI has been completed and the findings made public. That aside, there have been what the GPSU says are incomplete negotiations with government on wages and salaries. There has also been a salary increase payout based on an offer made by government. The union had made it clear that the pay offer was inadequate.
The point about all this is that since the current administration took office we have seen two major developments designed to address what is generally accepted to be a crisis in the Public Service. Up until now, however, neither of those appears to have placed us on a road to a long-term solution to that crisis. Things are still in a state of flux.
One utilizes the phrase ‘up until now’ to make the point that there does not exist an expectation that a Public Service that has festered in official neglect for so long will undergo dramatic change in a jiffy. On the other hand we are entitled to expect that what has been done up to this time will at least provide some sort of road map towards eventual meaningful transformation. However, even that, at this juncture, appears uncertain.
Little is known, publicly, that is, regarding such arrangements as exist for the full and effective implementation of the recommendations of the Lutchman Commission Report, and given this country’s proclivity for burying reports of Commissions of Inquiry (and the opportunity should be taken here to make the point that there have been quite a few other CoIs, the recommendations of which are yet to be implemented), this is not simply a routine observation. At this juncture, official assurances are required, and quickly, regarding the status of the implementation of the CoI. Either that or the government must explain the delay.
Even now, there is a strong case for an official explanation. While it is no secret that the hearings of the CoI included sentiments that strongly opposed the commonplace practice of awarding lucrative contracts to persons outside the framework of the Public Service Commission (PSC) appointments machinery, the practice remains in considerable evidence under the present administration. The point to be made here is that all too often contract employment appears to be at least in part, an eventuality arising out of scarce skills in a particular area, as well as a function of one or another shade of nepotism and cronyism.
One of the things, sadly, that successive political administrations have seemingly failed to accept is that the pay issue in the Public Service has to do with more than the inadequate salaries (these remain inadequate despite the recent 10 per cent increase) afforded traditional public servants. The other related issue is the sense of resentment felt by traditional public servants who must work cheek by jowl with their better-compensated counterparts, a condition that must surely create feelings of inadequacy.
To what is, by now, the urgent need to remove the inhibiting anomalies affecting the Public Service by hastening the implementation of the recommendations (at least some of them) of the Lutchman Report, must be added the need to clear up the anomalous circumstance that obtain in the matter of the incomplete government-GPSU talks on public servants’ wages, salaries and conditions of service. As an aside it has to be said that at least from the perspective of the GPSU the increases that arose out of the earlier round of talks were, in effect, imposed, since the union made it clear that it considered the amount of the increase to be some considerable distance behind the 40 per cent increase that it had been seeking.
By now one might have expected that the issue of the resumption of the talks (beyond actual wages and salaries, there are still a number of other issues on which the two must agree) would have returned to the front burner. That has not been the case nor has the government or the union publicly raised the issue of the resumption of the talks in recent weeks. Is there, perhaps, the likelihood, that all of this might slip quietly onto the back burner? It would surely help to hear from the union, and quickly, on this particular matter.
Unsurprisingly, and as has been the case over time, the absence of a militant mindfulness of their well-being has meant that public servants may well have returned to their customary condition of intense but passive resentment. As of now there is nothing to suggest otherwise. But then it is as much the future of the Public Service as the well-being of public servants that is at stake; successive political administrations have been playing monopoly with the Public Service for far too long.
