Yesterday, we told you that on July 1st, public officers would get back their 10% in full. The announcement was made both in a letter from the PM to the joint unions as well as in a video statement. However, just yesterday morning on Sunup on 7, PM Briceno promised to have one last meeting with the unions before a decision was made. That meeting didn't happen and the president of the PSU told us via Zoom that he wasn't even aware that the letter had been sent after it had been posted on social media.
Still, it should be a celebratory moment but the PSU aren't lowering their guards just yet. That's because while they're happy to get their pay restored, they don't feel like the burden of the fragile economy was equally shared. In fact, they believe they shouldered most of it. And the PSU president explained that more needs to be done to hold the private sector accountable.
Dean Flowers - President, Public Service Union
"I think that as any good citizen, people are always willing to make a sacrifice, but it cannot be a one-sided thing, it has to be a balance, it has to be shared approach and to this day we maintained that the sacrifice was not a shared sacrifice. It was not. We believe that public officers and the workers in general across this country were the ones who suffered the most out of this pandemic and while businesses also felt the impact, we don't believe that they shared as extensively as we did in the sacrifice in ensuring that government was afforded an opportunity to sell the superbond, acquire the blue bond and work towards putting in place new economic measures and policies to assist with the rebounding of the economy. I think that there is much more that the private sector could have done. A lot of the policy decisions that the government made were all in an effort to protect the private sector and little was done to ensure that the private sector was also doing its fair share where sharing in the burden and paying their fair share of taxes which is the biggest pet peeve with the private sector. We believe they are avoiding and evading taxes to a large extent and the government to date has not been able to identify the quantum of those leakages and we believe that we could be in a better position whereby even if the economy does not grow as fast as it is currently rebounding that we could be in a better position if we get good compliance from the private sector in paying their taxes, but the government have to put in place systems and policies that could address that and until that occurs, we will be on a path of sustainability."
