Chester Sam­bra­no

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert has re­vealed that wages in the pub­lic sec­tor amount to $19 bil­lion a year, which he said amounts to 40 per cent of the coun­try’s es­ti­mat­ed an­nu­al rev­enue.

Im­bert made the an­nounce­ment in a post on his Twit­ter page yes­ter­day, fol­low­ing calls by trade unions for a shut­down of the coun­try over a two per cent wage in­crease of­fer by Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer Dr Daryl Din­di­al for the pe­ri­od 2014 to 2021.

For­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an is val­i­dat­ing Im­bert’s com­ments on this coun­try’s wage bill.

Dook­er­an told Guardian Me­dia, “I do not rec­ol­lect the num­bers but it has al­ways been an is­sue for some time now.”

Dook­er­an be­lieves the time has come for a wage pol­i­cy to be de­vel­oped in this coun­try.

“We are now at the very be­gin­ning of a re­turn to some kind of up­hill road, but there is still a lot that has to be achieved. So in that con­text, I would think wage re­straint would be a nec­es­sary re­quire­ment for macro­eco­nom­ic growth and sta­bil­i­ty,” he ex­plained.

How­ev­er, he added that the wage re­straint must be linked to a cred­i­ble strat­e­gy for ex­pand­ing the growth process.

Com­ment­ing on the ar­gu­ment that in­fla­tion has in­creased over the eight years, Dook­er­an said, “It is wrong to say be­cause in­fla­tion goes up wages must go up, be­cause when that hap­pens it is a cy­cle that goes on and on. What has to go up is growth, when growth in­creas­es then in­come in­creas­es then wages must in­crease.”

He said while he un­der­stands that high­er wages are de­sir­able, it is just not cur­rent­ly af­ford­able.

Dook­er­an re­count­ed that when he was fi­nance min­is­ter from 2010 to 2012, he pro­posed a five per cent wage in­crease for pub­lic sec­tor work­ers but was over­ruled by the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship Cab­i­net.

Winston Dookeran

NICOLE DRAYTON

“And in my view, we paid a heavy price be­cause it was all those things that led even­tu­al­ly to the col­lapse of Petrotrin,” he said.

Dook­er­an, who re­cent­ly wrote a book en­ti­tled The Caribbean on the Edge, told the Gov­ern­ment and trade unions, “Some­times you have to have tears to­day in or­der to have ap­plause to­mor­row, or you wish to have ap­plause to­day and you will have tears to­mor­row.”

Notwith­stand­ing this, the unions un­der the Na­tion­al Trade Union Cen­tre (NATUC) um­brel­la are gear­ing up for a protest against the two per cent of­fer on Fri­day.

NATUC gen­er­al sec­re­tary James Lam­bert yes­ter­day ques­tioned why mon­ey is be­ing used to pay VAT re­funds.

“But you don’t have the time to sit down and say that the work­er re­al­ly works hard boy (sic), the work in COVID-19, they were on the front­line; the po­lice of­fi­cers, the nurse, the doc­tors, the port work­ers, the work­ers at WASA, the work­ers at T&TEC, they stood up and kept this econ­o­my go­ing, it wasn’t the Par­lia­men­tar­i­ans and now for them to get some­thing you of­fer them two per cent?” he asked.

An­nisette said, how­ev­er, that the unions are will­ing to come up with pro­pos­als to re­duce the bur­den of an up­front pay­ment of back­pay to work­ers and this will be put in writ­ing soon and de­liv­ered to the Gov­ern­ment.

He said one such pro­pos­al could be us­ing a pub­lic ser­vant’s back­pay as a down­pay­ment on a house from the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion.

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