THE EDITOR: Our newspapers are constantly littered with stories of ministers being blamed for an underperforming public service. Every reader has a trunk-load of experiences with government workers who do the minimum amount of work they can and do it with the least amount of enthusiasm they can muster.

These workers who populate every ministry, state agency, corporation, etc are notorious for non-delivery to the people who pay their salaries. And yet we don’t protest, we don’t hold them accountable in Parliament or at political meetings. What do we do? We blame the minister or blame the last government.

Governments come and go and the workers stay there, comfortably knowing that the public service doesn’t reward hard work or punish poor performance. Their supervisors won’t give them a bad performance appraisal because that is the culture of the public service, so why fix it if ain’t broke for you.

But it is broken and it is we the citizens who pay the price. So the question is then: why not just fix it? Well, I wish it was as easy as it sounds, but I suspect it requires legislation and for the Government and Opposition to work together, and we have seen how that has played out in the past. We are still waiting for the old talk to stop and for the Opposition to name a team to discuss national security.

But in the meantime, I also want to ask a few questions that may get some people upset. While the unions are shouting about how unfair the four per cent increase their workers got (along with back pay), where is the discussion about better performance from the public sector? While the four per cent is being belittled at every opportunity, where is the return on over $1 billion in arrears and the hundreds of millions of dollars more now being spent (or wasted) every year in salaries for the public service as result of that four per cent increase?

When the Prime Minister said he wanted to start the national conversation on constitutional reform, how many of us put this issue in our top five priorities? I suspect very few because the focus has been shifted brilliantly to an increase in the salaries for politicians and that requires much less thought and gives a lot more opportunity for bacchanal.

I say pay them the money because at least we can hold them accountable every five years. That other bunch has a job for life and no responsibility to answer to us ever.

DANIEL P WILLIAM

Diego Martin

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