Deputy Secretary-General of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Joshua Ansah, has revealed that the Single Spine Salary Structure has totally failed to achieve its objective.

According to him, there is the need for government to take a relook at the policy comprehensively to ensure that the situation is remedied. He indicated that government must understand why it’s unable to achieve the objective for which the single spine salary was to be the “panacea for pay disparities” in the country.

“I’ll say it has totally failed to achieve its objective that was set for the single spine salary structure. A lot of things go wrong, and we think that we need to relook at the single spine pay structure which I think a committee has been put in place to look at. But there are so many things and so many factors that have actually resulted in the low incomes for workers in this very country.”
Joshua Ansah

Mr Ansah emphasized that the SSSS has not “achieved its purpose” and a holistic reconsideration of it is necessary, otherwise the problem is going to persist for a long time.

On his part, the President of the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT), Angel Carbonu, stated that the fact of the matter is that majority of public sector workers are impoverished in the country.

Commenting on the recent Ghana Statistical Service report which revealed that more than 80% of public sector workers earn less than 3,000 cedis, with the lowest salary being 418 cedis, he explained that successive governments have refused to address the huge salary disparity in the public sector.

Mr Carbonu highlighted that government has instead pitted Ghanaians against the sector whenever there are demands for higher wages.

“We’ve even made demands from government that whenever government makes a statement that public sector workers are taking this percentage of internally generated revenue, then we tell government ‘ok, let’s sit down, let’s disaggregate them into portions, and let’s see who actually in terms of numbers takes the huge quantum of the amount of the internally generated revenue, who actually takes what home and who is actually taking the bigger chunk of the pie.”
Angel Carbonu

Public sector workers earnings

Mr Carbonu expressed that when the breakdown is finally done, it would most likely be discovered that political appointees take quite a considerable chunk of the government’s fund as compared to the public sector worker.

“For us, let us even see how much from the government kitty goes to these people and compare it to the public servant or the civil servant who has been working for the past 20 to 30 years and find out how much he or she also takes home, then you’ll begin to see the unfairness in how we dish out monies to people as compensation for work that they’ve done or work that they have not done.”
Angel Carbonu

The NAGRAT President underscored that the argument of salary inequality is always raised whenever government seems to “excite the sympathy” of the public to indicate that they’re taking this “huge percentage of our internally generated revenue every year”. As such, he explained that when public sector workers come to make demands, they are told they’re not “entitled” to what they make.

Mr Carbonu revealed that until the issue is appropriately addressed, public sector workers will remain impoverished.

“At the end of the day, [although] the statistics show that public sector workers are taking huge chunk of the revenue, the fact of the matter is that majority of public sector workers are impoverished in this country.”
Angel Carbonu