Minimum wage implications for policy-makers
Dear Editor,
Like so many viewers and listeners one could not help but empathise with the thrust of the budget presentation for 2015 by the newly christened Minister of Finance, Mr Winston Jordan. It could not have been easy for him to break so much new ground, while at the same time striving to repair the many fault lines that have broken components of the society over the past two decades.
The fault line of particular interest to this listener relates to not only the mere lifting of the minimum wage, but its implications for the policy-makers in the first instance; and consequently for those responsible for implementation.
Stabroek News of Tuesday 11, 2015 carried a simple interpretation of the announced adjustments in the following Table.
What may provide pause for discussion before implementation is the fact that the public service salary scales are reflected in the 2014 National Estimates which were operable as from 1st January, 2013.
So that according to SN’s understanding the current minimum wage is dated as of 2013, which is as follows:
To the best of my recollection the administration granted one or more of its annual across-the-board increases in 2014. If such a payment is confirmed it therefore means that the minimum wage in 2014-15 must be more than the sum of $39,540.
Additionally the standard practice has been to adjust the respective salary scales above by the relevant percentage increase. Presumably this methodology will continue to be applied.
But all of this attention is essentially about public servants who are employed in jobs at traditional rates. Again, as obtained in the last decade or more, the ‘contracted employees’ who usually have been more generously remunerated, also would benefit from the same levels of adjustment.
At this point in time therefore what has been achieved is but the status quo ante.
But the greater concern must be for those in the teaching service whose minimum wage at January 1, 2013 was $45,942. These professionals do not automatically benefit from the annual increases granted to their public service colleagues.
Whatever their financial status, however, one can only hope that this administration is more broadminded and would attend further to the special problems of temporariness of employment, the idiocy of discriminating between ‘graduate’ and ‘non-graduate’ holding the same range of responsibility; further compounded by the exotic application of an ‘acting’ appointment with a substantive salary scale.
Incidentally in terms of compensation design the word ‘scale’ is almost a euphemism since in the case of the teaching service the bands are so narrow as to make a nonsense say, of a performance appraisal increment.
The Minister of Education needs to be most attentive to these ills.
Yours faithfully,
E B John