And in other news, the president of the PSU announced on a morning show that the government has agreed to remove the 10% pay cut during this upcoming fiscal year. The joint unions met with the government's negotiating team yesterday and while up until this morning, the PM hadn't been briefed on it as yet he said that he thinks the unions are jumping the gun:
Hon. John Briceno - Prime Minister
"Maybe they're being a little bit premature but what we have to is the DPM and Minister Fonseca, they're going to, along with Minister Henry Charles, they're going to be reporting to Cabinet today and then we're going to be discussing because remember giving back the full 10%, we're looking at over $60 million more in cost and if we're looking at cutting in fuel then we're going to be out of whack so we have to find that balance. Mind you, I'm not in any way opposed to giving back the ten percent but we have to look at what is in front of us, the financial crisis that small countries like us are facing."
Courtney Menzies
"Some public officers are complaining that the government hasn't been financially wise during what was supposed to be an austerity time, for example going to the House for 3 supplementary budgets amounting to over $200 million, can you comment on this?"
Hon. John Briceno
"Well I can't expect them to say any different but what we've been doing is that there are certain services that we have to provide to people and we have to pay for it, for instance in the Ministry of Health we constantly had to be buying testing kits when the Omicron variant came in, we have more than probably tripled the amount of tests that we have done for the entire year of 2020 and 2021 and so we've been spending a lot more money in the Ministry of Health, Education, infrastructure, when we look at the rains and the way our feeder roads and agriculture roads have been in such a bad state, we had to spend the money, we had no other option than to be able to do that, we had to invest to make money, we had to fix the road so that our agriculture produce can come out and go to market."
Courtney Menzies
"But is there any other way where the government has been cutting costs and saving money apart from decreasing the wage bill?"
Hon. John Briceno
"But if you look overall, we have cut down cost, not only in the wage bill, but even in the expenses of running the government, we have managed to cut it down substantially by millions of dollars and the IMF did point that out and commended us for doing that in the goods and services, we held the line and saved millions of dollars on that end."
