PRESIDENT of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions Helene Davis-Whyte has welcomed the announcement from Minister of Finance and the Public Service Nigel Clarke that the national budget for 2022/2023 will “give disproportionate focus to the implementation of the restructuring of public sector compensation”.
Speaking last week Wednesday at the Jamaica Stock Exchange’s 17th Regional Investments & Capital Markets Conference, Clarke also said, “Along with the implementation of the public sector compensation restructuring, the Government will continue to pursue the transformation of the public sector and continue to implement the strategies to improve efficiency including mergers, closures and divestment of public bodies…as well as introducing technology to allow us to implement shared services where we can focus resources and over time bring our public sector wages to GDP (gross domestic product) ratio back in line over the medium term.”
In response to the announcement, Davis-Whyte remarked that from the standpoint of trade unions, she was satisfied with the focus on restructuring public sector compensations, which has been in the works for several years.
“The compensation reforms that the minister spoke of was something that was actually agreed [upon] between the Government of Jamaica and public sector unions under the umbrella of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions. This whole business as to how the public sector is remunerated actually commenced with Peter Phillips when he was the minister of finance in our 2012-15 meeting rotations and the process actually began there,” she told the Jamaica Observer.
Davis-Whyte added that at the time both the Government and public sector unions agreed on beginning a compensation review at the end of 2021 that would result in the creation of a coherent pay policy across all government ministries, departments, agencies and public bodies. The policy will be consistent with a reclassification of positions coupled with a system of evaluating workers’ performance.
“So, essentially, what the compensation reform or compensation review is about is trying to put in place a system of compensating public sector employees that would be less cumbersome and the system is cumbersome because you have … several different groups and theories coming out of the classification and you are not able to see how one relates to the other, you’re not able to see how the scale in one job compares to the pay in another job,” the JCTU president explained.
Pointing to a similar exercise of reclassification and compensations in the health sector a few years ago, Davis-Whyte said the new system of classification will create a “single spine system for all public sector jobs”. She also shared that the compensation will not only achieve “internal pay equity”, in which salaries for similar functions across government are comparable, but also “external pay equity” – comparative compensation between public sector and private sector roles.
Davis-Whyte said the reclassification and compensation review should alleviate the challenge of attrition in the public sector, a challenge Clarke said the Government was grappling with.
According to Clarke, “The structure of public sector compensation in Jamaica today is chronically unsustainable. For one, we are unable to attract and retain professionals we need to run public bureaucracy, and it has reached an acute level.
While agreeing with the minister of finance, Davis-Whyte argued that if the Government was able to package the competitive salary system with training and education opportunities, “it will make the public sector somewhere that’s attractive”.
So far, the Government has established a unit to update all union leaders and delegates about the new compensation and performance evaluation systems. Davis-Whyte expects that the Government will begin implementation of the compensation reforms on April 1, the start of the 2022/23 fiscal year, subject to buy-in and sign-off from all public sector unions.
“…Everything depends on what is the final outcome and whether the unions will be satisfied with what has come out of this. For us, satisfaction is really dependent on whether we believe the empirical work done can stand scrutiny and once we are convinced of that, then we will be able to proceed,” the JCTU head stated.
In relation to concerns about increasing the ratio of public sector wages to GDP – an issue the Government had when it was under an International Monetary Fund programme – Davis reasoned that once the spend results in an improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of public sector services, the Government should be able to justify that to their multilateral partners.
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