Professor proposes cut to work hours in public service

An academic is calling for public sector workers to move away from working eight hours a day, and is insisting that they be given the same pay.

Professor Don Marshall suggested that government workers being on the job for less than the traditional 40- hour week is one of the necessary steps that must be taken to repurpose the public sector to become more efficient and effective.

“They are sitting down there … We talk about productivity and so on, but you set them up to fail. You set them up to be underperforming because some of our best and brightest minds, because of the narrow structure of our economies, find themselves in the public sector and they are not necessarily happy campers.

“We need to free up the dynamism that is laying dormant within the public sector because many of our talented and bright persons end up working for government, and that’s not because government just wants to employ everybody. It’s just the nature of our economies not being diversified enough for a broader based private sector to employ them,” he said.

The Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES), University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill Campus, made the call as he delivered Friday’s Astor B Watts Lunchtime Lecture, at the Democratic Labour Party’s (DLP), Belleville, St Michael headquarters.

Professor Marshall dismissed the suggestion to reduce the size of the public sector, and referred to it as a “lazy” idea which he said would not be beneficial for the kind of society Barbadians have inherited.

He said the state will remain the largest employer and must find a way to dynamically release the talents and potential of public servants who find themselves working from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

In fact, the academic indicated that public sector workers should be made to work a minimum of five hours, leaving them with adequate time to spend with their families, or engage in some form of entrepreneurial activities within the boundaries of their employment contracts.

“It’s not any of the political parties’ fault that we find ourselves saddled with a historical backdrop of non-catalyst development, the absence of a black intergenerational class of wealthy individuals. It’s not their fault, but 50 to 60 years of nationhood means that we have to look intelligently at what we do with what we have,” he said.

Professor Marshall added: “We have a large public service, what are you going to do about it? You are going to increase efficiency? That’s one way, but another way is to see how do we give effect to broaden the base of development in Barbados where we are repurposing the public sector to put the talents where they might be best suited, and you are also freeing up a huge cadre of them from this eight hour, 40-hour-week rule, where you are saying to them it’s the same pay, but you are allowed a five-hour or six-hour day”. (AH)