Ghana government asked not to accept Smith-Graham’s resignation
The Public Service Workers Union (PSWU) has appealed to the President not to accept the resignation of the Chief Executive Officer of the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission to ensure faster implementation of the Single Spine Pay Policy.
The PSWU said: “If the resignation is allowed to stay and accepted by government, it has the tendency of jeopardising the implementation processes of the Single Spine Pay Policy with it repercussion on both workers and labour.”
Mr George Smith-Graham, the CEO of the FWSC, is reported recently to have tendered in his resignation as a CEO and given a three months-notice to leave office, stating that he was doing so to enable him to attend to his personal endeavours.
Speaking to the GNA in an interview on Wednesday in Accra, Mr Richard Amperbeng, the General Secretary of PSWU, said Mr Smith Graham had gone “through the learning curve of the implementation hiccups, and as we speak it is only one aspect of the implementation that had been fully completed which is the migration of public servants from their various pay salary structure to the Single Spine Salary Structure.
He said presently the parties involved in the issues of wages and salaries made up of employment stakeholders and government were working on the second phase of the policy; the Category Two and Three Allowance, which was based on instituting specific allowances.
Mr Amperbeng said officials were halfway through the implementation of the Category Two and Three Allowances and that had taken a lot of time since all stakeholders needed to be consulted and negotiate which allowances to agree on to be paid to workers.
He said there was also the third part of the policy which was the “reward management system” that was expected to link pay to productivity of specific workers in specific institutions.
Mr Amperbeng said the wages and salary policy was initially intended to be implemented within three years but it had taken six years and that there was no reason to further delay its implementation by allowing Mr Smith-Graham to resign for another person to be appointed and halt the process and take time to learn about the system before continuing with it.
He explained that with the vast experience of Mr Smith-Graham in human resource practice and salary administration, coupled with the fact that there was no deputy CEO at the Commission to understudy serving CEOs, it would be prudent for President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo to allow the current CEO to stay in office for at least 18 more months to complete with the implementation of the wages and salaries policy.
He said the Government should also appoint a deputy CEO for the Commission to understudy Mr Smith-Graham for the 18 months proposed period before he was allowed to resign.
Meanwhile, Mr Amperbeng has appealed to Mr Smith-Graham to rescind his decision to resign, describing the decision as premature.
“We are appealing to him to take it as a national service and that should supersede his personal interest,” he said.
In a related development, Mr Amperbeng has bemoaned the poor successive plan that was missing in most public services describing it as the pain and bane in Public Service.
He said most chief executives in the Public Service did not have deputies who were expected to understudy and take over from them upon their exit, adding that successive plan was taken for granted in most public services”.
Source: GNA