ERC subcommittee: Send home unproductive civil servants with full pay

The Economic Recovery Committee (ERC) Subcommittee on Public Service Reform has proposed a “radical” solution to the bloated and “unproductive” public labor force, that is for public servants deemed inefficient following assessment to be sent home with full pay.

The committee argued that many public servants are receiving a salary while being unproductive and this drastic move would right-size the public sector at the smallest political cost to the government.

“In the context of the ERC, we recognize that public service reform – both politically and as a matter of practicality – is a medium- to long-term objective. The testing of these concepts will occur within the framework of strengthening the public service while developing the capacity for public institutions that are ‘fit for purpose’. We also believe that there is a way that it can be achieved without the anticipated political fallout. The solution proposed is radical in its simplicity: assess the contribution of each public servant to the efficiency of the agency for which they work, and wherever that contribution falls below an agreed-upon threshold, send them home with full pay,” the subcommittee stated in its proposal submitted to the ERC.

“What is proposed, therefore, is not the termination or laying off of the unproductive public servant, but rather, a redeployment of that public servant. The proposal rests on the assumption that not only are those inefficient individuals not advancing the work of the public sector, but they are also actively impeding it. It starts from the proposition that if they were to be removed from active duty, processes would be handled more efficiently and the public needs would be met in less time, thus increasing productivity and its corollary, government revenue.”

The committee, comprised of Ed Fields, Dr. Nicolette Bethel, Dr. Yvette Pintard-Newry and Ken Kerr, was guided by The Bahamas’ civil service diagnostic conducted by the Inter-American Development Bank in 2018 and compiled in the report “Building State Capacity in the Caribbean: The State of the Civil Service in The Bahamas”.

The report analyzed the management of the civil service in The Bahamas and found that The Bahamas scored 16 out of 100 for efficiency, seven out of 100 for management capabilities, 10 for structural consistency, seven for functional capacity, zero for work organization and performance management and 11 for human resources planning.

The highest score The Bahamas received was for merit, in which it scored 47 out of 100.

As of December 2019, according to the most recent data provided by the Department of Statistics, there are just over 31,700 civil servants employed by the government or government corporations.

Approximately 40 percent of government expenditure is spent on civil servant salaries. The mean salary in the public service is $35,000, while the mean age of a public servant is 50 and approximately 58 percent of them are over the age of 45, the committee noted in its proposal.

The committee stated its proposal should not be implemented “wholesale, but rather following a pilot project which would test concepts observed during remote working due to the COVID-19 pandemic, during which some people worked from home. Some people were sent home and did not work, processes were streamlined and digitized in record time, goods and services were delivered to the citizenry in record time and despite the changes, the government functioned.

“Building upon these observations, we propose to design a pilot project in no more than three government agencies. The findings of this project will be used to draft a range of approaches to public service reform,” the proposal states.

“It is our intention that this method of reforming the public service will build the bridge between the appeasement of the status quo of the public sector and the cushion for the political directorate.”

The committee acknowledged that there may be pushback from sending unproductive workers home with full pay, benefits and pension entitlement, as many would argue there is no cost benefit to government.

To which it rebutted, “The immediate reaction to our proposal may be that it will not save the government any money and therefore it does not make sense. The rebuttal to this objection is that we are not proceeding immediately from the perspective of reducing costs in the short term, but rather from the perspective of increasing productivity, efficiency and revenue.”

The committee argued that instead, government expenditure would decrease over time with an immediate increase in productivity and efficiency.

“Further, we should remember that costs are not limited to monetary expenditure,” the proposal states.

“The current system is burdened with innumerable invisible costs: the cost of maintaining spaces for workers who do not pull their weight, the cost of excessive bureaucracy, the cost to the overall economy because of the difficulty in doing business and the sluggish collection of much-needed revenue which comes from under-productivity and petty corruption, both the results of over-staffing of government agencies.”

The ERC was established in May 2020 by the Minnis administration to develop innovative ways to grow and stabilize the economy amid the COVID-19 economic crisis. It is comprised of ten subcommittees which submitted more than 120 recommendations to be included in an executive summary, which was made public last December.

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source https://thenassauguardian.com/erc-subcommittee-send-home-unproductive-civil-servants-with-full-pay/