Franklyn: Bond scheme another name for slashing pay

Opposition Senator Caswell Franklyn has accused Government of once again “taking money away from public servants” when they had pledged not to do so.

Speaking in the Upper House as the Senate debated the Barbados Optional Savings Scheme (BOSS) Act, Senator Franklyn said: “In 1991 when the Erskine Sandiford administration cut public workers salaries by eight per cent, the Barbados Labour Party, which was in opposition at the time, said it was unlawful and that when they got into office Government would have to amend the Constitution to cut public workers’ pay. With this act, we are doing the same thing, yet they want us to believe that this is not a pay cut.”

He said Government was taking the “easy route” of “asking public servants to sacrifice their earnings and should have instead gone after private sector entities who had owed them significant sums of money in unpaid taxes.

Senator Franklyn said: “I remember when the Government recently wrote off the debts of corporations who did not pay in their arrears to the Value Added Tax department. I totalled the outstanding sums owed and I had to stop at one billion dollars when I checked out the records at the Registry.

“When I checked the unpaid income taxes between 1968 and 2000, there were people with larger properties in Bridgetown who were collecting rent and had not paid their taxes. There was also another company that had $25 million in principal owing to a Government department and did not pay it in, although they held Christmas competitions every year in which they gave out cars. These are the people the Government should go after to recoup any funds they need to rebuild the economy.”

He said the law was also unclear when it came to the definition of public workers, stating that while it was said all public workers would form part of BOSS, “The law is such that you cannot put statutory board employees’ money in bonds,”  the opposition lawmaker declared.

“They operate under the Companies Act although they are owned by the Government, and how can senators qualify for it when they are not paid a salary?” he queried.

Franklyn noted that while the programme is aimed at financing Government’s capital works programme to the tune of $150 million, “in the end, it will go to people who will pay their workers a pittance, cut their salaries illegally and keep the funds for themselves”.

Citing an example of the unfair practices at some construction firms, Senator Franklyn told the Upper Chamber: “I have seen situations where black supervisors get paid one third less than their white counterparts. There was one instance where a company asked a black manager to train a white man as a supervisor, and the manager doing the training was making $9,000 a month while his trainee was earning $18,000. At this time we can rethink what is being done because, in all honesty, we can hold off on the capital works for the time being.”

Senator Franklyn urged public workers to go ahead and take the bonds if they felt obligated to help Government, but he told Government that instead of targeting the public servants first, it should explore a number of alternatives.

He said: “If you want to save money, there are ministries that are unnecessary. We have one of the biggest Cabinets in the Commonwealth now. You can reduce the number of ministries to 12 or 14 and get rid of all the consultants acting on the Government’s behalf, there are still too many overstaffed Government departments with too many permanent secretaries and deputy permanent secretaries.

“Once you reduce these numbers, if there still is not enough to get your programmes going, then you can target the public servants.”