The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC), Dr George Smith-Graham, has said resolving issues pertaining to workers' conditions of service will help prevent strikes and other industrial actions on the labour front.
That, he said, was because about 80 per cent of industrial actions were due to conditions of service, while the remainder arose from disagreements between unions and management.
“If we can deal with the issues of conditions of service and harmonise the conditions of service, consolidate where we can consolidate and make sure that there are very few allowances …you would have resolved a lot of the issues that would be leading into crisis,” Dr Smith-Graham said last Wednesday in his closing remarks at the end of a two-day training programme for journalists.
The training was intended to enhance the capacity of selected journalists to accurately report on the ongoing transition of the FWSC to the proposed Independent Public Emoluments Commission (IPEC), as well as developments within the public sector pay system.
The two-day event was on the theme: "Building Media Capacity for Accurate and Responsible Reporting on the FWSC-IPEC Transition and Public Sector Pay Reforms.
The programme was expected to equip participating journalists with the requisite knowledge and context to contribute to informed public discourse and ensure balanced, accurate and responsible reporting on issues relating to public sector compensation and the FWSC–IPEC transition.
Directorate
Dr Smith-Graham said the directorate on grievances and negotiations was being revised into negotiations and industrial relations to engage unions at their workplaces to find out whether the conditions of service they had signed were being implemented.
“So we have noticed that and would revise that as part of the IPEC.
So they won’t wait until a grievance before they move in or when there is a negotiation.
Now they have a responsibility of going to the institutions because we have noticed that generally 80 per cent of all strikes are on conditions of service,” he stated.
Engagements
Among other things, Dr Smith-Graham said although the FWSC had the experts and resource persons to speak to labour issues, there was the need to build the capacity of others so that even the technical people and the media team would be able to respond to those issues.
“Sometimes the issues are highly technical, but we need to build the capacity of everybody so that even the technical people and then our media team would be able to respond to those issues,” he said.
He underscored the need for accurate reportage on labour issues and that the commission would want to engage media personnel quarterly.
In a presentation, the Director, Grievances and Negotiations Directorate, FWSC, Prof. Charles Adabo Oppong, said there were rules of engagement before the commencement of negotiations among parties to those processes.
He said, for example, they included the number of people who were to represent the unions and the government and issues of confidentiality as far as the engagement was concerned, and to also demonstrate the level of good faith in the negotiations.
For his part, the Director, Research Monitoring and Evaluation (RME) at FWSC, Dr Bernard Adjei-Poku, in his presentation, said the IPEC was about institutional reform and not just a change of name.
He said establishing IPEC did not automatically increase or reduce salaries, and added that the role of organised labour would remain a critical part of the reform.
“IPEC is not just about Article 71: their inclusion requires constitutional amendment. IPEC will not put all state-owned enterprises on one salary structure; legitimate differences among enterprises will be recognised,” he said.
