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Civil servants are now back on living pay packages, and when salary, allowances and the new US dollar linked allowances are totalled, the poorest paid civil servant must now be earning close to the equivalent of the US$540 of October 2018 that seems a standard for civil service unions.
The latest unilateral increases from Government are being implemented while negotiations continue to both ease the plight of State employees as well as show the Government’s good faith.
The unilateral extra payments do not replace whatever deal is eventually struck, but mean that delays in the sort of detailed negotiations that are required do not have too serious a negative impact on civil servants.
It also means that whatever the final deal looks like it cannot be worse than what has been already implemented. The Government cannot withdraw any offer when it has already implemented that offer.
Under the new situation following the unilateral action, all civil servants get US$300 a month in foreign currency, the US$250 Covid-19 allowance and the new US$50 a month portion of their latest pay increase.
In addition every civil servant gets the local currency equivalent of US$150, which will be adjusted up or, perhaps these days down, in line with the interbank rate.
This means that every civil servant gets US$450 in either US dollars or the guaranteed equivalent in local currency. All this is in addition to the rest of their normal salary and allowances and it is highly unlikely that the guaranteed parts of that package chew up everything.
The remainder of the package might not be denominated or tied to the US dollar, but it is there.
Of course as you move off the bottom rung of the civil service pay scales there is more and more salary and allowances in the portions not tied to the US dollar.
One useful negotiating point would be to extend the ladders within pay scales, and to widen the gaps between rungs. The minimum civil service wage should just be for new hires with just basic qualifications.
Civil servants should have a decent career progression, getting reasonable pay increases for extra skills and responsibilities and even for seniority.
This seniority pay is important as in many areas there are extremely limited promotion posts. One obvious example is the teachers, easily the largest group of civil servants. There are a lot of teachers for every deputy head or head, and a lots of heads for every provincial director or head office post.
The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education hires a lot of skilled graduate professionals, but maintains a small supervisory and managerial structure.
This means a lot of teachers are likely to remain as teachers throughout their career, perhaps rising to department head with seniority but that post does not shower wealth on a teacher. So to have a proper career, the ladders, which have been restored, need to be seriously thought out so that a teacher with 30 years under their belt can be paid enough to remain in teaching.
Many parents like the idea of their children being under experienced quality teachers and so they need to be kept in service.
This can be tested easily. At most high schools when the examination results are released there will be one or two subjects where the pass rate is significantly higher than the school average. If you probe, the odds are high that you will find an enthusiastic and experienced teacher who can make the subject come alive, be relevant and be able to get the pupils to understand what it is about.
Obviously such a teacher needs to be paid more, a lot more, than some brand-new graduate just out of university who is still figuring out how to do the job well.
Perhaps they need even to be paid more than some hot shot manager who makes deputy head at 30, who will if good eventually climb higher, but meanwhile is also still learning about the promotion post. There is nothing wrong with having pay ladders overlapping.
We see this in a lot of other ministries with the growing professionalism within the civil service, where a lot more of the work requires high-quality skilled and qualified graduates of technical training and university.
Such staff do not require much in the way of detailed supervision: they are supposed to know what to do and when to do it.
So again there will be a lot more “doing posts” than promotion posts, and those who do the work need to be able to ascend a meaningful ladder of pay scales.
Perhaps the Health Ministry might well have the ultimate groups. It is not uncommon to find a really top specialist, say a first class surgeon who saves a few lives every day, who dislikes administration and budgeting and all the paraphernalia of managerial posts, but has a lot of ex-patients who are alive because of their medical skills and commitment. Such people need to be paid to do rather than to manage.
Of course not all long-service staff deserve seniority pay. You do get those whose idleness, incompetence and closeness to alcoholism are not quite at the levels where disciplinary action is possible, but whose absence would not leave a large hole in the civil service.
But the Government seems to have thought of this with the rolling out of annual evaluations, and those with consistently good reports should be able to climb a good pay ladder.
This will have the effect that the bottom paid civil servant will likely to be a very recent hire and unlikely to have vast family responsibilities, and if any good at all will soon be climbing up a pay ladder and leaving the lowest rung forever.
This will make the minimum pay for a civil servant just a reference point, rather than a pay package that anyone who is reasonably able will actually earn, at least for more than a year.
The Second Republic has seen the Government develop a negotiating stance where the national council gets information, such as the amount of money available, plus a Government offer.
Usually that Government offer is cemented into the system by being implemented promptly, so civil servants know what the minimum improvement is, but with the Government willing to continue the negotiations and see what else can be generated or found in the way of pay or perks or other improved conditions.
This openness and the obvious concern for Government staff has helped to generate far better relations between the Public Service Ministry and the representatives of staff associations, as there is general acceptance that the Government will push remuneration in all forms as fast as resources allow.
The Government will not wreck the economy, but will explore the budgetary limits of pay allocations.
This is why, as conditions improve, both parties need to go further than just percentage increases, and start doing more on how the budget can produce the most conducive conditions, where skills, experience, innovation, competence and commitment can be properly rewarded in what might be a more complex set of pay formulas.
Online Reporter