Peter Espeut | Zero per cent in year one

Sometimes I wonder if I am missing something.

The Government is trying to convince us that they have put the economy in the best place it has been in forty years, and that is why our finance ministry has been commended by the IMF, the World Bank, and the IDB: the reserves have never been higher, unemployment has never been lower, inflation is under control, our credit rating is improving, and the last mountain to climb is to achieve five per cent growth in four years (the famous five in four), and they promise that will happen in the next chapter.

Yet all they can offer state employees is a zero percent salary increase in Year One, and a cumulative wage increase of seven point five per cent over four years.

Now we all know that the government’s inflation target is the band between four to six percent per annum. They don’t want it lower than four percent (otherwise the economy will suffer stagnation, and even deflation); and so at best, in Year One, the purchasing power of government workers will decline by four percent, while their income remains flat, which means that – in reality – they will have taken a cut in real income of four percent.

And the Government expects self-respecting workers to take that?

INFLATION

What is worse, over four years, inflation (at best) will be 16 per cent, while the offered salary increase over the same period is seven-and-a-half per cent? Over four years the cut in purchasing power and standard of living for every government worker would be eight-and-a-half percent.

And that is only if inflation is at the lower end of the band; if inflation stays within the band – but at the higher end – inflation might be as high as twenty-four percent, which means that the cut in the standard of living after four years will be 16 and-a-half per cent.

Does the government expect their employees to accept this backward steep meekly?

I am definitely missing something!

And if the Government fails to tame inflation, and it exceeds six per cent per annum, who to tell how much of a cut public sector workers will experience?

And this is after politicians recently gave themselves a two-hundred-plus per cent salary increase?

And all this is proposed just a few weeks before the date of a general election is announced?

I am definitely missing something!

Is the plan to provoke street riots, and so to delay calling the election?

Is the plan to suddenly announce a 200 per cent salary increase for government workers, and then during the euphoria to call the election?

Or is it that the economy is in dire straits?

I am definitely missing something.

We know that when it comes to fiscal matters, we are not our own masters; we have to toe the line drawn for us by the multilaterals, or face the music. To offer a zero per cent salary increase a few days before an election looks like political suicide. Are the fundamentals of the economy really that healthy, for us to be faced with multilateral strangulation at a time like this?

MEDIA

What has happened to media? Where are the investigative reporters? Where are the academics, with their fingers on the pulse of national affairs?

The ruling party has certainly not been tiptoeing around! They cannot be successfully accused of avoiding controversy! The naked constitutional reform power grab; postponing the retirement of the DPP; sidelining the political ombudsman; neutering the Integrity Commission; announcing “prepare to meet thy judge or thy maker”; placing paseros in strategic places, where blindness might be a virtue; planning to increase the power of the ministry over church schools; trying to force through a fifteenth parish; campaigning with public funds; spending twelve years of future income in this election year; and all these without seeking bipartisan support, and without meaningful public consultation.

And I remain worried about the influx of hundreds of firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition in the run-up to the election, and that no one so far has been caught!

The ruling party and its leader must be supremely confident that no matter how abrasive they are, or how corrupt they appear, or whatever they say or do, they have it in the bag. They must feel that Jamaican voters will sell their votes for curry goat (or fried chicken) – a profoundly contemptuous position – or they have some grand strategy to discredit the opposition in the run-up to the election.

Either the ruling party is naïve and foolish, or somebody knows something.

Anyway, I wait to see how the minster of the public service can get away with a zero per cent wage increase in Year One. And I wait to see the numbers when the Opposition begins to campaign.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and development scientist. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com