Dear Editor,
According to SN’s report of Friday May 24, 2019, Presidential action will be taken shortly to establish a ‘high-level committee on Public Service’. This appears to be without reference to the (higher level) Commission of Inquiry into the Public Service, 2016. After some three years, there has been no announcement of any recommendation being implemented. (Remember the fate of the Task Force on Teachers’ salaries and conditions?) The fact is that the COI’s Report of 2016 has not yet been laid in Parliament.
If SN’s report is accurate, then it is difficult to appreciate the imbalance in representation of the respective parties, with Government’s containing a formidable six Ministers supporting the President, and overwhelming the single GPSU representative in its President.
Informed cynics might interpret this singular representation as indicative of disconnections within the Union’s executive. Certainly his hosts would have been concerned at the paucity of representation at such a critical intervention.
Notwithstanding, it is hoped that the parties would agree that the basis for the proffered ‘livable wage’ and ‘better working conditions’ would be informed by the Report of the COI into the Public Service, 2016.
Basic issues like the de-bunching of salaries, and raising the colonial pensionable age of fifty five years (the lowest in the Caribbean Governments) to sixty five years (as in Barbados for example) still have to be addressed.
That Report also highlighted the substantive (apparent constipative issue) of ‘Contracted Employees’. These are just samples.
In the process, observers would look forward to the Terms of Reference of a Committee higher than those of the very Government’s Commission of Inquiry, 2016.
In the meantime, one cannot help but reiterate the need for a comprehensive reconstruction of the
categorisation of skills and competencies in the Public Service.
Composed since the 1980s, they become almost irrelevant in the face of new and changing technologies and methodologies. For example the most anachronistic job title must be that of ‘Typist/Clerk’, with no typewriter in sight. So, the matter of ‘working conditions’ must be related to systems and equipment utilised.
The outdated job categorisations of: a) Administrative; b) Senior Technical; c) Other Technical & Craft Skilled; d) Clerical and Office Support; and e) Semi-skilled & Other Operatives will invite a comprehensive revision by carefully selected teams of human resources and technical expertise, who will have to grapple with the range of skills, competencies and otherwise, including amongst ‘Contracted Employees’, as categorised in the National Estimates.
Incidentally, two or more decades ago, when the Jamaican Government undertook a reconstruction of its Public Service, they appointed recognisable expertise and catered for the exercise to last up to two years. The time was well spent and the outcomes most gratifying.
In the instant case, as said earlier, it is hardly likely that such a vision is being conceived.
There are those of us who beg for such a conceptualisation.
Yours faithfully,
E.B. John
