President John Dramani Mahama has pledged to carry out a review of the Single Spine Salary Structure (SSSS) and Pensions, as part of the government’s efforts to address concerns of public sector workers.
The President made the promise in his address at the opening of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) 54th National Delegate Congress and Seventh Quadrennial Conference in Accra, on the theme “Education and Development: The Ghana Education Service (GES) at 50: Reflecting, Reviewing, Revising, and Growing the Profession and the Unions”.
The SSSS is a public sector pay system, aiming to standardise wages for fairness and transparency by grouping jobs onto unified salary scales.
It was introduced by the Kufuor Administration; however, negotiation was not complete when Professor John Evans Atta Mills won the 2008 election with Mr Mahama as his Vice President.
President Mahama said the Kufuor administration, prior to leaving office, threw a lump sum increment and dumped a single spine on Ghanaians.
He sai,d however, organised labour, led by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) decided that they were not going to accept it and that they would negotiate with the new government.
“And so it took quite a while for the negotiations to take place. But eventually, we managed to get a spine that was working. It was not exactly straight, a bit crooked, but at least everybody got something,” he said.
“And so we started paying the arrears and all that and we managed to get through all that before we left office in 2016. Since then, a few things have happened. The spine is very crooked now and everybody is unhappy. Everybody is unhappy with the spine.”
President Mahama said the TUC raised concerns about the SSSS it with the Government and asked if they could look at the whole salary structure again.
The President reiterated that they were very willing to review the SSSS, so that they would be able to remunerate people better,
This, he said would enable workers to give off their best in terms of what they asked them to do.
Concerning pensions, President Mahama recalled that a few years ago, they did a new pension reform; saying “Everybody was happy, Tier 2, Tier 3. It looks like the time has come for us to look at it again”.
He said the TUC, as a leader of organized labor, raised the issue with Government.
He noted that he had told Mr Joshua Ansah, the TUC Secretary-General and his team that the Government was prepared to put together a working team to look at the whole pension reform and come up with some suggestions and see how they could improve it; so that everybody was happy and feels secured going into retirement.
Reverend Isaac Owusu, the National President of GNAT, in his welcome remarks, appealed to the President for an immediate review of the single-spine pay policy within this year to reflect the Government’s Resetting Agenda.
“We are resetting Ghana and so the pay policy must reflect that Resetting Agenda. It is essential that we advocate improved salaries and benefits that recognize critical role teachers play in shaping our society, he stated.
“A well-motivated teacher, your Excellency, is more motivated and this directly translates into better learning outcomes for our students.”
