Public sector wage freeze
Dear Editor,
At the recently held Annual Conference of the Jamaica Stock Exchange held at the Jamaica Pegasus , I spoke, inter alia, about wage adjustments in the public sector. Apart from the two years of wage freeze included in the coming agreement with the IMF, I also made reference to the wage freeze under the previous Public Sector MOU process and concluded that the public sector would be having a total of four years of wage freeze over a 10-year period.
The presentation was probably not sufficiently clear, as some people have interpreted my comments to suggest that there will be four years of public sector wage freeze. This is not so. The agreement with the IMF as set out in the Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies states that “the government is committed to maintaining the current public sector wage freeze on salary increases into FY 2011/12”.
I trust this clears up any misunderstanding on the issue.
Wesley Hughes
Financial Secretary
Ministry of Finance and the Public Service
30 National Heroes Circle
Kingston 4
