Public servants urged to cope with 4% base pay increase

•Austin Gamey believes a renegotiation of the agreement will be difficult

•Public servants have been up in arms with the announcement as its the lowest in a decade 

A labour expert, Austin Gamey has urged public servants to make do with the 4 percent increment in their base pay for the 2021-2022 period.

This comes after increasing agitations following an announcement that public servants were going to have a 4 and 7 percent base pay increase- the lowest increment in a decade.

Reacting to the development in an interaction with the B&FT newspaper, Austin Gamey explained that owing to negotiations by all parties with a document already signed, not much can be done to reconcile the decision hence calls for a renegotiation of the base pay for public servants will be difficult to undertake.

“If the parties go to the table and make every reasonable effort and negotiate in good faith, reach agreement and sign unto it, then they would have to hold unto that excerpt if after the negotiation the economic data that was used in reaching the decision significantly changes,” he explained.

“When this happens, a party can call for a come back to the table; there, the new concerns would come up. Even with that, what can be asked for is some form of Cost-of-Living Allowance (COLA) but not a pay increase. This is because the negotiation is deemed to have happened in good faith and therefore it is quite impossible to alter it. The COLA is just to bridge a gap that has made public servants worse off after negotiation,” Mr. Gamey told the B&FT monitored by GhanaWeb.