Last week we learned that a third
of the staff of the Portfolio of Civil Service received pay raises right before
their pay was cut in efforts to ease the government’s budget crisis.
Deputy Governor Donovan Ebanks
tried to defend the pay raises in the Legislative Assembly on Monday, stating
that the decisions to give eight employees an increase during a government
budget crisis were made “some months before the announcement on 6 May”.
“Some months” apparently equates to
just days before the government announced a pay cut for civil servants.
Interestingly, as far back as September 2009, Mr. Ebanks himself spoke about a
potential pay cut for public servants. With pay cuts on the table from back
then, and a soft hiring freeze for civil servants in effect from late 2008, we
are astonished that pay increases for a large portion of a government portfolio
were even contemplated. Everyone in the civil service had to know that pay cuts
were not only possible but probable, given the government’s financial
situation.
Civil Service officials stated the
pay increases were warranted because of additional responsibilities or
additional qualifications received by the employees involved. Although this
might be true, it does not mean that the civil servants had to get a pay raise
during a time of financial crisis just because they deserved it. Many private
sector businesses have implemented wage freezes over the past two years and we
fail to see why the public service shouldn’t have to operate with the same fiscal
constraints, especially since they’re using public funds.
More importantly, Mr. Ebanks must
realise how the increases to a large portion of the portfolio staff appear to
the public and to civil servants in other departments. Anyone looking at this
situation would likely conclude that the increases were made as a way of
pre-emptively negating the coming pay cut.
From the public’s point of view,
this is just another case of the tail wagging the dog and the public service
doing whatever it wants. The people of this country should be outraged not only
with the pay increases, but also with the attempt to defend the indefensible.
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