Public servants wages and salaries: The rhetoric and the reality

We can probably anticipate an animated reply from the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) to the forthright comment made by Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) President Vishnu Doerga on the 10 per cent salary increase in public servants salaries offered by the Government of Guyana and which the union says it rejects. The essence of Mr Doerga’s argument is that when you crunch the numbers the economy has not earned a 10 per cent salary increase for public servants and that if the matter were to be judged from a strictly private sector perspective no such increase was likely to have been granted. In that regard, Doerga implies, public servants should count themselves fortunate.

GPSU President Patrick Yarde appears to be ‘all set to go,’ so to speak in response to what Mr Doerga has had to say in much the same way that the long-serving union leader has taken on first, Finance Minister Winston Jordan then Business Minister Dominic Gaskin on the issue.

Perhaps a point that should be made early in the piece is that the GPSU having written to the Ministry of Social Protection to ask that itself and the government now engage in a conciliatory exercise in the light of the union’s rejection of the government’s offer, these interventions, whether they be by ministers of government or private sector officials might well be seen by the union as premature and counterproductive ones that might have the effect of ‘colouring’ an as yet unfinished process. Recently, Mr Yarde made what many might regard as a valid point when he asserted that the public discourse on the matter, not least the ministerial – and now the private sector – interventions could well create a feeling in the public mind that the negotiations, which are still ongoing, have long been done and dusted and that there is simply no coming back to, re-negotiating, if you will, the 10 per cent offer.

The government and the union have been engaged in a not too delicate dance on the matter of the salary increases. The former’s announcement that it would make the ten per cent payout in October not only seeks to send a message of finality as far as the offer is concerned but also takes account of what it believes is a half-a-loaf-is-better-than-none mindset of the public servants. Truth be told, not too many people believe that public servants are about to ‘close down’ the country over the disparity