A former member of the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC), Mr Andy Asamoah, has called for a truce between the government and the various labour groups.
He explained that there was the need for an independent body to be set up "to evaluate and review the implementation of the Single Spine Salary Structure (SSSS)", which brought about the labour agitations.
Speaking to the Daily Graphic Monday, Mr Asamoah, also a former Director of the World Health Organisation in charge of Human Resource, said even though the SSSS was to harmonise the salaries of all public service workers, its implementation was not properly thought through.
He said during the truce, workers should be made to stop all agitations and allow the independent committee to work within a limited period and submit its recommendations to the government for the forward implementation of the policy.
He said the commission should have completed the entire job evaluation and discussed its work with stakeholders before going ahead to implement the policy.
Mr Asamoah further suggested that the independent body should comprise representation from various bodies to ensure that comprehensive work was done this time round.
He said issues such as salary grades and the complexities in arriving at how much should be paid to categories of workers should have also been discussed.
He questioned why market premiums were now being discussed two years after the implementation of the basic structure.
Mr Asamoah said all that the labour unions were asking for, such as allowances and market premiums, should have been determined before the beginning of the implementation of the policy.
He was of the view that the piecemeal approach used to implement the policy did not help matters and explained that when the salaries of the Police Service skyrocketed, the situation gave hope to other workers that they would be treated in like manner.
He suggested that the salary structure of the security services should have been put together and proper education done on why, for example, a warden in the Prison Service and a constable in the Police Service with the same qualification might not be on the same grade.
Mr Asamoah also wondered why the Chief Executive Officer of the FWSC had been responding to queries by the labour unions, instead of the Chairman of the commission.
He noted that the daily media encounters had brought bad blood between the CEO of the FWSC. who is a public servant. and his colleagues in other sectors.
He said there was, therefore, the need for such media encounters to be discontinued during the truce period, adding, "We cannot continue to use the media to solve these problems."
He stated that a lot of things had gone wrong and called for a fire-fighting approach to immediately put things in order, since such agitations were tarnishing the international image of the country.
Mr Asamoah said there were many people in the country who had the expertise to assist in solving the current implementation hiccups in the Single Spine Pay Policy (SSPP) and called on the government to identify such people and make them part of the independent committee.
"It has reached a point where the greater interest of the country should be the cardinal point," he said, adding that it was time for the country to go back to the drawing board, instead of the FWSC and the various labour unions trying to win the media war.
He said that tendency would result in the destruction of the very good intentions of the policy and called for the right technical people to be identified to stem the tide.
Mr Asamoah also observed that Mrs Cooper Enchill, who prepared the original report being implemented by the FWSC, should have been made to play an active role in the implementation of the policy.
However, he said, there were many professional labour experts in the country, such as Mr Austin Gamey and others, who could be called upon to play a role in the independent committee to find a solution to the present impasse.
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