Peter Espeut I NOTE that there are self-serving "guidelines" which determine the salary levels in the public service. One is that Cabinet Ministers must earn one dollar more per week than their Permanent Secretaries. It's a wonderful dolly-house arrangement. Raise the salaries of the civil service and yours goes up automatically; and "it's not my fault," you bleat; "I didn't ask for an increase; it's automatic!" For real!
Of course the civil servants love it. They know that the politicians have an interest in increasing public sector salaries; they start every negotiation with friends on the other side. It's the type of conflict of interest our system of government thrives on. It was a master stroke for the civil service to establish this principle; congratulations to them!
Another principle: the public sector should be paid at 80 per cent of the salary of an equivalent person in the private sector. Another coup for the civil service! Congratulations to them! Now without an additional lick of work, the salaries of our low-performance civil servants will increase to match the emoluments of their highly productive private sector neighbours. And of course, the salaries of the politicians increase at the same time, and it's not their fault, they bleat.
As a principle it's a joke. The arrangement should be that when productivity in the public sector rises, then salaries should rise. Registered Titles must be ready faster, and enforcement of laws and the justice system must be swifter, more children in school must learn to read, and the environment must be better conserved, before an increase is justified. You set a dangerous precedent when staff wages must rise based on someone else's productivity.
Applying this principle must be a very difficult business fraught with anomalies. Which private sector entities do we take as our benchmark to calculate the 80 per cent? Bashco? KFC? Grace, Kennedy? The Gleaner Company? The bauxite sector? Salaries in the private sector are not uniform, and I suppose you can't blame civil servants for looking to the high-end of the spectrum for their benchmark. And of course, the politicians will get theirs too, so no objections from that quarter.
And those private sector entities which stay in business are the more efficient ones which keep their other costs down and maximise their returns. If we copy the salary scales without copying the efficiency, it is a recipe for bankruptcy!
Jamaica is world-famous for the size of the gap between the rich and the poor, and nowhere is this greater than in the Jamaican private sector. Some years ago when the comparison was published, Jamaica could boast the eleventh highest gap in the world between the rich and the poor, and the fastest growing gap. With the model of the "Great House" and the "Barracks" to guide us, the salary scales in our private sector are guided more by status considerations than productivity, and it is not uncommon for persons at the top to be paid hundreds of times more - not including lots of hidden and not-so-hidden perks - than persons at the bottom.
This represents waste and inefficiencies in our so-called "productive sector" which makes us uncompetitive with even our Caribbean neighbours. Frankly, our private sector executives pay themselves too much! [I have written before about the savings easily made by the Trinidadians upon taking over Carib Cement Company]. It is this inefficient and top-heavy private sector model that our civil service is uncritically seeking to emulate - with the support of our politicians who are laughing all the way to the bank.
People at the top love across-the-board salary increases. If you earn $100,000 a 10 per cent increase means $10,000 more this year, and $11,000 more next year; while if you earn $50,000 a 10 per cent increase means $5,000 more this year, and $5,500 more next year. In the meantime, the gap between the two posts has increased - from $50,000 to $55,000 to $60,500.
Another source of salary increases in the public sector is so-called "reclassification". Everyone's salary is hierarchically set relative to someone else's. The assumption here is that a supervisor must be paid more than the person they supervise. Think about it: this "principle" is nothing more than a statement about status. Talk about the vestiges of colonialism! The function of "supervising" is important, requires training, and carries a value with a corresponding salary; but some of the persons being supervised may be more highly trained, with rare skills which carry higher values and salaries than the supervisor. But in our status-based system, the supervisor must be paid more. [Choose therefore to supervise high-status rather than low-status workers].
And so a complex web of hundreds of tiers is spun, with this post higher than that, higher than the other, with corresponding implications for salaries. If you manage to successfully argue that your post should be reclassified higher up, then this triggers off a further series of reclassifications as other posts are adjusted; and then anomalies are created which trigger another series of reclassifications; of course with strikes and go-slows along the way to spur on the process. None of this is based on productivity at all, but on the perceived relative status of the various occupations.
In this scheme there is no room for productivity incentives (this might create anomalies with staff earning more than supervisors) or profit-sharing or employee share-ownership (all of which exist in the private sector). It just goes to show that you really cannot compare the public and private sectors in this way.
And it's not all one-sided. There is no equivalent in the private sector for the power felt by a junior clerk in the civil service - or a policeman - dealing with a member of the public. That takes the place of many dollars! And leave entitlements in the two sectors are not the same. Can you imagine what would happen to profits and productivity if private sector staff got the same sick leave, casual leave, departmental leave, emergency leave, study leave, vacation leave, etc., as those in the government service? Not to mention air ambulance service to hospitals abroad?
I fear that in all of this, the cost of government will get higher, the level of service to the public will get lower, and the whole country will become more pauperised. God help us!
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and is the executive director of an environment and development NGO.
