Public Lives Just compensation for civil servants By Randy DavidPhilippine Daily Inquirer 12:06 am | Sunday, June 29th, 2014 132001361 On a visit to Singapore in 2012, my wife and I listened in amazement as our taxi driver ranted about the excessive salaries that, he said, government officials in his country were paying themselves. “Their lives get better every year,” he went on, “while the rest of us ordinary folks slide into poverty no matter how hard we work.” Comments like this reached a peak just before the 2011 general elections, whose outcome confirmed a stunning decline in the public approval of the ruling People’s Action Party. As I found later, the context of the taxi driver’s outburst about government compensation rates was the report of the “committee to review ministerial salaries.” Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had promptly ordered the sharing of the report with the public, preparatory to its being debated in parliament. The prevailing sentiment favored a scaling down of salaries, and the committee echoed this in its recommendations. Interestingly, the head of the committee, Gerard Ee, was from the private sector, as were a good number of its members. In his letter thanking them for their work, PM Lee noted the complexity of the effort to “strike a balance between attracting capable and committed leaders of integrity, strengthening links with our socioeconomic progress, and reinforcing the ethos of public service.” Whatever one might say about Singapore, that country has always prided itself in being a meritocracy. It sees the need to recruit the best, the brightest, and the most capable of its people to government service as a condition for the nation’s continued progress. Singapore’s leaders believe that public service is a calling and a privilege, but they also feel it should not be seen as a form of sacrifice. This means, among other things, that the salaries of public servants must not differ widely from those in the private sector. In 2009, salary levels in government were at par with, if not somewhat higher than, those in the private sector. In 2012, the committee recommended a 36-percent cut in the salary of the prime minister. The effect of that slash was carried down the line. But even at diminished levels, what Singapore pays its civil servants still look incredibly high compared to Philippine government salaries. According to the recent report of the Commission on Audit, the highest paid Philippine government official in 2013 was the president and general manager of the Government Service Insurance System. The COA said Robert Vergara received P12.08 million in total compensation for that year. The amount may seem astounding, if not scandalous, but, in fact, it is less than one-third of the annual salary of S$1.1 million (P38.5 million) of an entry-level minister in Singapore. PGM Vergara is charged with the responsibility of managing a multibillion-peso portfolio in the volatile global financial market and of protecting the value of GSIS members’ contributions. If he applied as an investment banker in some midsize company in Singapore, Hong Kong, or even Makati, he would probably not have a hard time negotiating at least twice that salary. That he has chosen instead to work in government must count for something. Yet, the other day, using the same COA report, radio commentators had a field day heaping sarcasm and bile on highly paid government officials like Vergara, making no distinctions whatsoever and drawing freely from the general contempt reserved for political appointees in this country. By what right, they asked, should a subordinate of the president get more than five times the salary of the president himself? Framing the issue in this way, they only succeeded in reinforcing the common misunderstanding that government work must be treated as missionary work and therefore does not deserve to be properly compensated. It is not fair to judge people as being overpaid without looking at comparable compensation rates in the private sector for the same positions and responsibilities. The rates for Philippine civil servants, from the president down to the lowest clerk, are just totally unrealistic. Set by law and rarely reviewed, they reflect the enormous guilt that comes from having to govern a society where the people are mostly poor and hungry, more than the huge task that needs to be done in order to get the nation out of poverty and hunger. At the ridiculously low rate at which the presidential compensation is pegged, it is not at all surprising to see his salary surpassed several times over by those of his own appointees to government-owned and -controlled corporations. This doesn’t make sense. One cannot justify this state of affairs by saying that the presidency is its own reward. Less saintly individuals who occupy that position are bound, sooner or later, to compensate themselves in nontransparent ways. But, more than this, consider the structural consequences. Because the salary of the country’s highest public official is pegged at a very low level, the government is unable to adjust the salaries of its public school teachers and university professors to make these competitive. Many are thus tempted to transfer to the private sector or to go abroad, even if this means breaking their contracts with the public institutions that subsidized their graduate training. Those who remain find themselves engaging in various income-generating activities not always complementary to their official work. In this manner does corruption occur in the least expected places, often rationalized in a tone reminiscent of the excuses offered by those who routinely take kickbacks from government projects. * * * public.lives@gmail Follow us: @inquirerdotnet on Twitter | inquirerdotnet on Facebook Join the discussion… Jose B. Flores • a few seconds ago Sir, with all due respect, the Civil Service Commission is some kind of inutile, I say this in the context of what Article VIII of the 1987 Constitution provides; Section 5 The Supreme Court shall have the following powers:… Appoint all officials and employees of the Judiciary in accordance with the Civil Service Law. Section 6. The Supreme Court shall have administrative supervision over all courts and the personnel thereof. The general sentiment then I believe was to prevent a repeat of the Marcos episode in our history where the Supreme Court has become a virtual rubber stamp, legitimizing the Dictator’s wishes. Any Civil Service Commission official, even before accepting the appointment, must be well aware of this Constitutional obstacle to any effort to professionalize the bureaucracy, especially the Judiciary, so any such official worth his or her salt must have in mind alternative causes of action like, bringing the matter repeatedly before any appropriate or available forum, failing in which said official, taking into account as aggravating the nature of his or her Constitutional duties becomes worse than 40% of 3,000 government officials including Cabinet officials,who are unqualified to hold their positions, “these officials, consisting of managers, directors, assistant secretaries and undersecretaries, do not have the appropriate educational background and skills to perform their duties well; they dont have the correct educational skills and appropriate background plus experience to perform their respective duties well”, to borrow from a former Chairperson of the Civil Service Commission. I have written the CSC several times apprising the Chairperson of my plight. I have been a Court legal Researcher 2, a non lawyer item, of Branch 120 of the Regional Trial Court of Caloocan since 1996, I passed the 2001 Bar Examinations, I have been by-passed in the designation as Officer in Charge three times and by-passed in the appointment as Branch Clerk of Court twice , in 2006 and in April of this year, on both occasions, for the period material I was given pejorative performance ratings, to disqualify me from promotion. In a process called deep selection, a next in rank employee maybe bypassed in appointment even in favor of an outsider if there are “special reasons” to be stated in the recommendation, the evaluation and the decision on the protest on the appointment. The Protest to the appointment is decided by a special division composed of the three most Senior Justices . In November 2006, CJ Davide, AJ Puno and AJ Panganiban Denied my Protest to the appointment of the branch clerk of court , a new lawyer, now a Public Prosecutor, on the ground that for the pertinent period, I received an Unsatisfactory” performance rating. How could the erudite Chief Justices in perusing the records in search for the justifying “special reasons” missed the fact that the said “Unsatisfactory” rating is currently under protest or has yet to be resolved up to this writing by the Honorable Court Administrator. My first Unsatisfactory rating was courtesy of our former Branch Clerk of Court, now an Honorable Judge, he must have predetermined my rating because he gave me two Unsatisfactory rating for the same rating period, first using the form for supervisors and another using the form for non supervisors, it has become a sort of precedent or the law of the case since then. Every Protest on the subsequent pejorative ratings, all without basis in fact and law, were all Denied by the reviewing bodies; the PERC/Lower Court and the PERC/ Office of the Court Administrator. Just recently I wrote the Supreme Court through the Chief Justice invoking their administrative, and their power to educate, to take cognizance of the matter because the Office of the Court Administrator in dismissing my protest reversed controlling principles of law laid down by the Supreme Court En Banc, particularly the Ang Tibay doctrine, the Ibangga and Judge Apita cases.Not only did CJ Serreno ignored my letters, she even issued an Order to allow the vacancy in our Office for the position of Branch Clerk to be opened and filled and then appointed a new layer the recommended of the Judge as our new Branch Clerk of Court. My take home pay every payday is about eight (8) thousand pesos, a Branch Clerk of Court ,if I am not mistaken earns about eighty (80) thousand a month. In the midst of invalid central personnel agencies and Supreme Court Justices made monkeys by unscrupulous individuals or groups, such motherhood statements calling for across the board increase in the salary in the public sector would only turn the situation from bad to worst don’t you think so Sir?
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 10:24:53 +0000
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