Should salaries be increased for 'umbrella-carrying' civil servants?

Increasing the basic salary applied evenly will not motivate workers to strive. Because there are many people who do not deserve a salary increase.

Good news for workers before the April 30 and May 1 holidays, the Government has decided to increase salaries for officials and civil servants from July 1, 2017. Accordingly, the basic salary will increase from VND 1,250 million/month to VND 1,300 million/month. This is a great effort of the Government in balancing the budget to increase salaries.

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The story of salary reform is always hot but has never been completely resolved. Because, to reform the current salary requires solving problems beyond the salary system, even outside the salary system but has a decisive meaning to the success or failure of salary system reform.

According to statistics, by the end of 2015, the number of subjects applying the salary regime according to current regulations (excluding the armed forces) was approximately 2.73 million people. Of which, those working in state administrative agencies from the district level and above were 310,000 people, commune-level civil servants were 256,000 people, people's council delegates at all levels receiving allowances were 302,000 people, the rest were groups working in Party agencies, unions and public service units...

According to Mr. Bui Sy Loi - Vice Chairman of the National Assembly's Committee on Social Affairs, the situation of civil servants "going to work with an umbrella in the morning and coming home with an umbrella in the evening" is quite common while the apparatus still lacks capable people, and there is still a brain drain.

"According to experts' estimates, up to 30% of civil servants are unable to do their jobs, equivalent to 700,000 people, costing the budget 17,000 billion VND each year" - Mr. Bui Sy Loi repeated his statement at a conference on salary reform held at the end of 2016.

Talking about the current unreasonable and unfair salary payment method, Mr. Bui Sy Loi cited: “There was a period when we raised salaries for people with salaries below 2.34, which means that those who did well got nothing. We handled it humanely but did not create motivation for the development of the agency or unit. But now it is very difficult to raise the issue of salary reform, there is no budget and it is unfair.”

So when are workers paid correctly and sufficiently for the effort they put in? According to Mr. Bui Sy Loi, only when wages are linked to labor productivity and wages must be intrinsically motivated to increase labor productivity. In principle, the average wage increase rate is always slower than the increase in labor productivity, which means that you must accumulate what you do.

“Eating is important, but without savings, how can there be expanded reproduction? Currently, we have no savings,” Mr. Loi emphasized.

At the same time, Mr. Bui Sy Loi also said that our current salary cannot be reformed. We have only discussed salary reform but it is already too difficult. Because our apparatus is too cumbersome, the more we do it, the more difficult it becomes. Raising salaries will lead to increasing prices. Currently, salaries are in a vicious circle, "patching up the old" and cannot be resolved thoroughly.

In addition to the shortcomings mentioned by Mr. Bui Sy Loi, our current salary scale is still too inadequate, most people still pay salaries based on seniority or even though the salary is low but if they have a position, the extra income, the "illegal" part is very large, so salary increase is meaningless for many people.

Another equalizing and horizontal salary increase, each person gets a little bit… but still cannot solve the problem of salary reform.

Most workers rely on their salary to maintain their lives and reproduce their labor. However, because the problem of streamlining the payroll and reducing the cumbersome apparatus has not been solved, hard-working or lazy, efficient or inefficient workers all receive the same salary increase, which does not create motivation for competition and development.

When the apparatus is still cumbersome and inefficient, when we do not use results as a measure to calculate salaries, and the salary scale is not reasonable, then salary does not become a driving force to promote work development, but even becomes a huge obstacle, because it creates a mentality of waiting, relying, and watching each other work.

According to VOV