THE EDITOR, Sir:
IT WAS with great anticipation and pre-relief that library assistants and archives and records management employees collected their pay advice slips for November. The long-awaited and much-deserved (albeit paltry) salary adjustment and retroactive monies were finally going to be received. All who had started evening classes to further their education could now pay for same which they had been attending on 'trust'.
But alas! This was not to be... the bare 'Gross Salary - $22,000' glared back defiantly and mockingly. How dare these fools believe that the Ministry of Finance could care about a bunch of overworked underpaid civil 'servants'?
Since October of 2002, public sector employees were promised adjustments to their salaries within 80 per cent of the private sector's over a period of time. Some received same in October 2002 and again April 2003. Library assistants were never in the lot since the 'committee responsible for the negotiations was now defunct' and there was no one else who cared enough to come to their assistance. Still they waited and hoped.
According to Ministry of Finance circulars 32 and six, these adjustments were made and approved effective October 1, 2002 and April 1, 2003, respectively. Each organisation affected received notification and were advised to 'submit details of additional funding required' to the Public Expenditure Division of the Ministry of Finance. This was done many months ago by the respective accounts departments but to date the Ministry has paid out neither the new salary scales nor the retroactive monies which keep accumulating every month.
In the meantime, library assistants slink slowly homeward each evening, too afraid to venture anywhere near institutions of continuing education lest they be pointed out as, to borrow a popular SLB phrase, 'deadbeats'.
I am, etc.,
DISAPPOINTED
bsharlene@hotmail.com
