Public-sector wage committee reactivated
Published:Friday | October 29, 2010 | 12:00 AM
The Government and trade unions yesterday officially reactivated the Public Sector Monitoring Committee, which will address issues such as wages, employment, productivity enhancement and cost-savings measures relating to the public sector.
The committee, which comprises trade union and government representatives, and which is chaired by minister of state in the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service, Senator Arthur Williams, was launched by Prime Minister Bruce Golding at Jamaica House.
The prime minister said the committee at its first meeting within the next week, would first look at the seven per cent increase over which the parties have been haggling.
The increase was agreed but the Government says it has no funds right now to pay it.
"It is something that must still be put on the table for discussion in the hope that we can arrive at some understanding and, as we have decided to pursue several months ago, to see whether there are other ways in which the government would be able to provide creative alternatives to the actual cash transfers of the seven per cent," said Golding.
"That proposal is something we would like to pursue and I would want the monitoring committee to take up as one of its most urgent tasks," he said.
Williams said a special sub-committee would deal with the seven per cent increase due to workers and make recommendations on how it should be dealt with.
He said that with the reactivation of the committee, he hoped public-sector industrial disputes could be resolved before they escalated into strikes, as happened recently.
"We certainly hope it will help, because the issues that have led to industrial actions are the very issues that will be considered by the committee, so we hope that dialogue will prevent any actions from taking place," he said.
Finance Minister Audley Shaw cautioned that the Government was still constrained by agreements with the International Monetary Fund as outlined in the letter of intent.
Not to honour the terms of the standby loan agreement, he said, would have dire consequences for the country.
The prime minister said that in entering into an agreement with the IMF, the Government was encou-raged to cut public-sector jobs.
"We took a decision that no, we would not, but in taking that decision we had to give a commitment that the wage bill would be aligned to our gross domestic product in terms of what is considered to be the desirable target," he said.
Jamaica has committed to reducing the wage bill to about 9 per cent of GDP. The wage bill is now at J$127 billion. The Government also pays out an additional amount for pensions, estimated at about J$11-15 billion.
Wayne Jones, general secretary of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions, underscored the need for the committee as a way for the government and its workers to re-engage and rebuild trust, saying the relationship has been damaged.
"It is because of that damaged relationship why the road has been so rocky. We have not been able to find solutions and resolutions and we believe that this mechanism called the Public Sector Monitoring Committee will provide us with potent opportunities and challenge to rebuild that requisite good relationship between workers and employers," he said.