THE government has agreed to “one-off” cash payments of between $400 and $600 per week to public sectors workers up to March 31 when the current Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) expires.

Under the agreement, which has been made an addendum to the MOU, those workers earning less than $250,000 per annum will get an allowance of $400 per week; those earning $250,000 to $650,000 will get $600 per week; and those earning above $650,000 per annum will get $500 per week.

These are net payments which are to be paid on normal pay days, beginning next Monday, and will be effective to March 31 next year when the MOU ends.

The workers will have the option of taking, instead, a moratorium on staff loan repayments up to next March which would result in the repayments being rescheduled to April 2006.

The agreement, signed yesterday at the Ministry of Finance and Planning, will benefit 88,000 public sector workers and will cost the government $1.8 billion.

The move has provided much-needed breathing space for the trade unions representing workers in the sector who had complained of coming under extreme pressures from members who felt that the government was not carrying its share of the burden of the agreement, primarily in terms of cost of living increases.

The MOU, which came into effect in February 2004, had required that cost of living increases be held within the single figure band. However, last year cost of living rose as high as 14 per cent and this year it is threatening to rise even higher.

Claims by the government that the increases were outside of its control, as they were attributed to multiple hurricane disasters and rising oil prices, have done very little to console the workers.

At the 12th meeting of the MOU’s monitoring committee on September 1, president of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions (JCTU) Senator Dwight Nelson brought forcibly to the attention of the committee that the agreement had brought “so much pain and suffering on the workers”, that they were not prepared, as union leaders, to continue to suffer the “abuse and vilification” coming from their members.

They said that unless the government was prepared to share the burden of the public sector employees, “we are prepared to withdraw even at the cost of job loss”.

The JCTU suggested, as conditions for sticking with the MOU: an immediate hardship payment to all public sector employees; bringing forward the second tier of the increased income tax threshold from January, 2006 to October, 2005; and allow tax relief to the public sector workers on a number of fringe benefits.

The parties agreed to the formation of a committee to review the JCTU’s recommendations comprising government representatives Dennis Morrison, Jamaica Tourism Board chairman; Dr Wesley Hughes, head of the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), and Financial Secretary Colin Bullock; and JCTU representatives Wayne Jones, Lambert Brown and Helene Davis-White.

Prime Minister P J Patterson intervened into the issue last week Monday by demanding that the committee conclude its work by Friday so that the Cabinet could discuss their proposals Monday.

balfordh@jamaicaobserver.com