A report claims that if the government is to give in to civil servants’ demands to be paid $1 700 a month, the wage bill will rise three-fold. The Civil Service Apex Council (CSAC) demanded that the minimum salary of a civil servant should be pegged at $1 700. CSAC chairperson Cecilia Alexander said:
Yes, the government is broke, but we are workers of government. At the end of the day when we have provided a service, we also want to be able to earn something that will make us look after our families, at least to live a reasonable life.
Whether they are able to pay or not, we are now saying we are in a worse off situation and as workers, it is our right to demand the value of what we have been earning. It is not correct for any government whatsoever to remove a benefit or to give somebody less without even engaging them.
In fact, the $1 733 is not a figure that we came up with to get an increment, it is just a matter of asking the government to restore the value of what we were earning around September (2018). At the end of the day, all we want as civil servants is to have the value of what we earned restored, so it is up to the government to either look for the US dollars to pay us in hard currency or the other way round.