General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Dr Yaw Baah, has disclosed that the real wage for public sector employees is on a decline in the country.
According to him, an increment on the real income wage of workers must rather be considered by implementing the right measures.
To ameliorate matters, Mr Baah called on government to support the citizens to reduce suffering in the country.
“Real wage for public sector workers has started declining and it is not right. We should make sure that single spine is designed to ensure that real wages actually increase but not decline. I think we have people, experts in this country to be able to do it to ensure that even negotiations can be tied to it.
“We work out the real wages and see if the real wages for one year to the other is declining, government adjusts pay such that real wage will not decline”.
Mr Yaw Baah
He further called for a reform of the Central Bank to strengthen its regulation in order to avert banks failures in the future.
“If you are using GHC 22 billion to clean the banks, this is expensive. There are very few things that cost that much. If a reform should cost GHC 22 billion, it means that we have really spent money on this.
“What we are saying here is this that if we look at how much money we have spent to make sure the banks are clean, we should never make a mistake of going back to that state again. Therefore, the Bank of Ghana itself must be reformed”.
Mr Yaw Baah
TUC objects to government’s decision on salary increment
Prior to this, the Trades Union Congress had objected to government’s decision not to increase the wages of public workers for the next 3 years.
According to the Congress, “government alone can’t say we are doing this or doing that without having to decide with the other parties; labor and its employers”.
The Union emphatically stated that the deciding power to increase or decrease wages of public workers isn’t the preserve of government alone.
Public Relations Officer at TUC, Mrs Naa Ayeley Ardayfio, lamented the undue pressure under which workers have to compromise on their salaries.
She insisted that it is the responsibility of the Standing Joint Negotiation Committee to resolve issues on the wages of workers in the public sector and not the government.
“You think it is the workers that have to give? It is always the case that the workers are at the tail of everything. And in any case, as we are all tightening our belts, then the belt must be tightened across board”.
Mrs Naa Ayeley Ardayfio
Corroborating her assertion, President of the Graduate Teachers Association of Ghana (NAGRAT), Angel Carbonu, described the act by government as “highly unacceptable”.
He quipped whether the prices of goods and services were being held constant particularly in relation to “increasing fuel cost which leads to increased transportation, accommodation and so on and so forth”.
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