Dear Editor,
Mr. Anand Goolsarran is certainly respected by colleague professionals and other readers for his persistent preoccupation with aspects of accountability within organisations private and public. This reader may well have missed one or more of his substantive observations on the Public Service, particularly regarding the current structure and disposition of employee remuneration, moreso about differentials between the permanent pensionable Public Servant and the increasing numbers of Contracted Employees as portrayed in the Annual Budgets. Mr. Goolsarran must certainly be aware that, as obtains in the Teaching Service, the salary structure reproduced in the Annual Budget has become a myth for at least the past two decades.
The initial conceptualisation of a salary scale always included the fundamental stimuli of an increment based on recommendations emerging from a demanding performance-based system, long disposed of in our Public Service, by politically proposed annual increases — in time and value. The resultant demoralisation of pensionable Public Servants leads to several considering options about continuing employment including that of becoming a ‘Contracted Employee’ for the latter could well benefit from starting his/her career in the same of comparable position – in 2023 – with colleagues with five and indeed more years of experience. Remember that in the milieu that promotability is no guarantee in the absence of any performance evaluation system.
How does one cope with this confuscation of equality? It is in the context of this depletion of the human being that Mr. Goolsarran is being asked to utilise both his professional and moral authority to persuade his colleague, the Auditor General, to formulate a most comprehensive programme of investigation regarding the Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats deriving from the inhumane compensation structure with which human beings in the Public Service are perceived to cope. From any distance concern must be given to LEAVE – its eligibility vis a’ vis its availability, and the differential between that affects performers’ (male and female) health (physically/mentally) and their families? This observer derives from a period when the appointment/promotion letter specified all the leave terms (paid and unpaid) – local/overseas; as well as acting allowance for the relevant performer.
In 2023, most stunning is the lack of known eligibility for leave for professionals at the critical level of Guyana’s Judiciary, ignoring the not unreasonable possibility of physical and mental health stressors and the concomitant implications for these performers and their families – in a constricted environment from which ‘leave’ means substantive ‘escape’. Their children who, amongst other things, can now access more informed comparabilities, not only in the Caribbean, must wonder about their choices for professional longevity, as well of course of their own bequeathal to their children, in the light and shade of the persistent insensitivity of current decision-makers. Meanwhile they must opt for Pre-Retirement Leave.
Sincerely,
E. B. John
