Danger Signals From Fair Wages?

Would the current lull on the labour front last? The recent anomie of strikes involving teachers at all levels of the educational ladder, doctors and public pharmacists, which is still lingering, as well as threats from judicial workers and nurses, is not a scene that Ghanaians would want repeated any time soon.

A National Labour Commission ruling, that got doctors back to work last week, mandated the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC) to finalise work on the schedule for the payment of conversion difference, the bone of contention for the prolongation of the strike, to doctors.

But signals from the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC) are suggestive of possible problems going forward.

In a CifiFM interview, published on both Citifmonline and ghanaweb, a top FWSC official affirmed that the commission was doing everything possible to obey the Labour Commission's directive on doctors, but that the issue was 'dicey'.

'Although the Labour Commission ruling is simple, the FWSC would make sure that the integrity of the Single Spine Salary pay policy is guarded… The implementation of the court's ruling is not that simple, because it is a very dicey issue… The FWSC wants to make sure that the ruling, in respect of the doctor's issue, does not create new problems within the health sector… When you are healing a particular ailment, you must heal it in such a way that its side effects don't come to compound the problem, and that's what the FWSC is doing,' Mr. Earl Ankrah, FWSC Public Affairs Manager, reportedly said.

The Chronicle finds this position of the FWSC ominous. It is open to multiple interpretations, including one that despite the Labour Commission ruling, the doctors may not be paid their conversion difference, if it could lead to agitations from other health workers.

We are baffled as well. Was the FWSC not part of the negotiations that got the doctors back into their consulting rooms? Why did it not put this holistic view that it is canvassing now on the table then? Why did it sit in there for a parochial conclusion to be reached, only to turn round to raise objections to it? That would be a very dangerous way to proceed.

The doctors demonstrated during their last strike that over the issue of conversion difference and its effect on their pension contributions, they would gladly flush their Hippocratic Oath down the toilet. In the past, most doctors' strikes floundered on the implication of the Oath, but no longer. The patent inequity in the determination of ex-gratia for politicians has, regrettably, finally breached that previously sacrosanct threshold.

The Chronicle would advise the FWSC, for whatever it is worth, to go strictly by the Labour Commission's latest ruling on the doctors' conversion difference, and concomitantly declare a dispute over the determination of the conversion difference for all professionals on government payroll.

This duty of a new and holistic conversion difference should be that of the Joint Tripartite Negotiating Committee of the public service or relevant body.

We think this is the route to peace on the labour front in the interim. Let's embrace it today!