Even as the State government surprised the general public by implementing the recommendations of the Seventh Pay Commission in favour of the government employees, it also shocked them with the mention of restructuring its workforce.
In the same Government Order (GO) that revised the pay, allowance, pension and related benefits, from the pay cell of the Financial department, the government stated its decision of forming a committee to restructure the workforce in the State administration. “The move is completely against government employees and we strongly condemn the move,” said A Mayavan, state co-ordinator of JACTO-GEO.
Citing the existing number of vacancies in the government offices including government schools, Mayavan said that it was unfair to remove the existing government employees and fill the vacancies through outsourcing. “Indirectly, the government has announced that they will not recruit any more people for government jobs,” he said.
With more than a crore people registered with the Employment Registration office, the government’s move was definitely a big blow to them.
The government should find a permanent solution to sort out the unemployment problem. Employees, recruited through contract basis, were already protesting for several years now to regularise their jobs and include them in regular pay scale as they did not get any benefits enjoyed by government employees, he added.
With more than 40 percent of the posts in government officers remaining vacant, S Kumar, district secretary of JACTO-GEO said that the employees were forced to carry the work burden of four to five persons. This increased work pressure has pushed them into anxiety and depression. “Outsourcing will lead to no development other than in corruption,” he said.
According to him, the government was trying to utilise the unemployment rate and existing poverty in the State to employee the people at a salary much lesser than `7,000 per month even without any benefits.
However, this was not the first mention of restructuring. The government had spoken of forming a commission to restructure the workforce while implementing the recommendations of the Fifth and Sixth Pay Commissions also, said M G Devasagayam, a former IAS officer. Till date, no actual restructuring has taken place.
The government version of restructuring was that they would not recruit new cadre, he said. Due to the pertaining vacancies, the existing employees would be overloaded, thus making the officials to seek money from the public for prioritising the work.
Stopping the new recruitment, the government would start outsourcing and bringing in temporary employees, he said. “The political leadership has no concept of governance. All they want to do is just win the election,” Devasagayam said, explaining that the actual restructuring included re-framing of governance and administrative structure.
Where is Performance Related Pay?
Even as the State government implemented most of the recommendations of the Seventh Pay Commission, they neglected the Performance Related Pay (PRP) for the government employees
The Commission, in its recommendation, suggested that PRP for all categories of employees based on factors including quality of results, framework, documents and reformed annual performance appraisal reports