Ho, July 8, GNA - Dr Anthony Baah, Deputy Secretary General of the Trades Union Congress, has said there was enough goodwill from government to implement the single spine salary scheme from January 2010 as scheduled.
He said the roadmap to implementation was on course and that the "cost scenarios" had been completed for presentation to cabinet soon. Dr Baah, who was addressing the Volta Regional Council of Labour in Ho on Monday, said the proposed scheme should bring some equity for work that many commissions had attempted to address in the past. He said the expectation was that the Single Spine Salary would address the low public sector pay, one of the lowest in Africa. Dr Baah said the new system would not mean an automatic raise in incomes for all workers and that certain categories of workers could already be enjoying salaries at par with the levels that would have been granted them under the scheme.
He said the proposed system is based on scoring jobs according to factors including knowledge, experience, judgment, supervisory responsibility, working conditions, hazards, mental and physical effort. Dr Baah said affected public sector workers must be asking themselves "how big their jobs have been scored," and that it was the responsibility of Human Resource managers to provide their employees with explanations on the scoring system.
He said commercialized concerns within the public sector were not part of the single spine regime.
Dr Baah said the base line in the scheme would be negotiated periodically to reflect inflationary and general economic trends in the country. The meeting also discussed the new pension law and the international Labour Organization (ILO) Decent Work Agenda.