Rex Nettleford
THROUGHOUT THE 1990s the challenges for the public sector employees in some CARICOM Caribbean countries, were exactly the same as the challenges for all others, at least to begin with. As a 1988 CARICOM Report on Regional Development to Year 2000 indicated:
"Major development challenges face the Commonwealth Caribbean on the eve of the 21st century. Real per capita incomes in seven of the 13 countries are lower than they were in 1980. In all other countries income growth has slackened and in some cases, there are signs of further decline. It is clear that the requisite supply of jobs cannot be forthcoming if the regional economies continue on their present economic growth path. The prospect before the region is an unemployment problem of high proportions and with grave social implications."
ARROGANCE AND INEPTITUDE
In all this, it is always good to remember that it is not simply because Governments who are the employers in the public sector, are wicked, arrogant and inept, though there is evidence that some evil, arrogance and much ineptitude have been rampant among certain governments in the region. If the powerful politician could be respected to sign a letter "Arrogantly yours," the civil servant must always remember to sign 'Your humble servant'. For humility goes with civility which we dare not forget. We also need to remember that we continue to function as part of a world economy (we now speak of a globalised economy) which was never designed for the benefit of the likes of us and continues to operate in the interest of the developed one-Third World at the expense of the other two-thirds (usually designated the Third World). Jamaica and the rest of the region are very much part of that two thirds though the upper five per cent of our population, with or without the benefit of oil would like to convince themselves otherwise in their pursuit of an international consumption pattern that bears no relation to the region's actual self-generated earnings and productivity.
INEVITABLE EMPHASIS ON ECONOMIC FACTORS
The emphasis on economic factors is inevitable and public sector employees dare not fail to grasp the import of all this in a rapidly changing world. But, as that CARICOM Report further states, the vast changes taking place in the world economy "create great uncertainty and the major challenges arise as much from them as from current unsatisfactory performance. They pose grave difficulties for CARICOM countries, as for all developing countries, and may even overwhelm some. But they also provide opportunities which can be used to improve development prospects."
SEIZING OPPORTUNITIES
A major challenge for the public sector employees, then, is the ability to seize such opportunities out of the jaws of crippling liabilities, to snatch every ounce of hope out of the glut of despair and restore to public sector operatives the historical pedigree and existential legitimacy that they undoubtedly have.
But this is not going to happen with civil servants remaining reactive rather than pro-active, detached rather than participatory, lone rangers rather than team players in the desperate search for new patterns for development, new ways of going about one's business, new modalities of operation in providing for the wider society the bare essentials of decent and tolerable living. Providing for others, moreover, is a continuing challenge since there is no escape from accountability to the general populace who elect the people presiding over the administration of the services they expect to render, with the public servants as strategic operatives in the rendering.
The vulnerability of the public service per se in all this, I have already hinted at. The IMF targets public expenditure to have its debtors live within their means and bail themselves out of the debt burden. Private commercial creditors expect no less. So-called mandatory cutbacks usually take the form of redundancies, premature ceilings on salary increases and even wage freezes. Jamaica's MoU is here instructive. Not infrequently, an underpaid and overworked public service results in underachievement, sloppy work and non-productivity which in turn promotes justification for punishing the sloppiness and mediocrity of work performance with low salaries and less than encouraging work conditions. The Jamaica Civil Service Association must avoid this at all cost. But in doing this, it must understand that pay incentives by themselves have nowhere solved the problem of productivity or self-respect - something well known to workers in private sector enterprises the world over.
MEASUREMENT OF HOURS
Much of public service by its very nature does not usually provide a workplace whose effectiveness can be measured by piece-rate work on the part of individual public servants. Nor is the measurement of hours in any strict terms a real means of determining output. For the civil servant, the affairs of state are such, in any case, that the flexibility of work hours was always the occupational hazard of the profession of government. The preparation of a Cabinet submission, the crafting of the budget in time for presentation in Parliament, the refinement of this or that policy statement as part of the complex strategy of development, will demand the unscheduled time of scores of civil servants. From stenographer, through accounting clerk to Permanent Secretary, each is expected to walk the extra mile when one least expects. More important for all concerned is the full grasp of the complexity of the deceptively simple job one is called upon to do. 'Deceptively simple', because each job is just part of a continuous integrated process in which every task is important depending, as it does, on every other, in which every individual is himself or herself very important as well.
COMPLEX INTEGRATED EXERCISES
This is the nature of much that is public service work; and the once straight-forward traditional simple stand-alone jobs that one individual could do in manufacturing enterprises in developed economies have now been changed into the kind of complex integrated exercises that people in the traditional Civil Service should have long known. A place like the United States was said to be "moving rapidly toward a service-knowledge-information-high technology-based economy." We in Jamaica are ourselves undergoing similar changes.
