ISCF wins court case but may lose the battle

The recent decision by the local courts has handed the Island Special Constabulary Force a victory in their case for receiving their back pay although it did not specify a time for payment.  This case will also serve to direct the government in how to deal with other public sector workers.  For a country that is struggling to survive and to meet the IMF financial targets this decision could throw the whole island into chaos.

There was never an issue about the entitlements of the workers as a contract existed which set out those entitlements.  The bigger issue is whether the government has the right to refuse to pay or put off paying based on the company’s financial problems.  There are many countries today that have asked their civil servants to take wage cuts or salary freezes in order to help balance the budget.  Workers are entitled to their pay and have a right to take whatever action they deem necessary.

However, the workers have failed to take account of the fact that many of them are extremely inefficient and to demand more money when you are not doing a good job is one of the many bad attitudes that must be changed.  Many public sector workers still have generous leave packages that private sector workers would love to have.  The complaint is made that civil servants are not often paid as well as the private sector.  That is true but what is also true is the level of work expected from private sector workers is often two to three times as much.  Private sector workers often have to work under extreme stress in order to be able to meet challenging deadlines.

Secondly, the workers have failed to recognise that there are too many persons in the civil service and that many of them contribute to the inefficiency because it is a way of receiving payments from persons for expediting the work that they were hired to do in the first place.  Now each group has different problems and different staff issues and often times it is not the number of staff that one has but it is the quality that they possess and quality is always better than quantity.

While recognising the claims of the workers and their victory in the court, what is not clear is how the situation will be resolved.  It may be that in winning the case and receiving the back pay the workers will feel vindicated.  However the win may come at the cost of more jobs in the public sector.  It is back to the problem of whether it is better to have more people working at a lower level of pay or to have less people working at a higher rate of pay.  I suspect that that debate will rage on for many years to come.