How will civil servant and officer salaries change?

Those are the new points in the salary policy reform project to be presented at the upcoming 7th Central Conference.

The project clearly states 5 viewpoints, in which “salary must be the main income” to ensure the life of workers and their families. In the public sector, the State pays salaries to cadres, civil servants, public employees and armed forces according to job positions, titles and leadership positions, in accordance with State resources, ensuring a reasonable correlation with salaries in the labor market.

Objective: Develop a new salary regime to be implemented from 2021, linked to the roadmap for administrative reform, streamlining staff; innovation and reorganization of the political system; innovation of public service units.

Determine the lowest salary level of the public sector (the salary level of people doing jobs requiring intermediate level of training) from 2021 to ensure that it is not lower than the lowest salary level of the enterprise sector.

Drivers, unpaid civil servants

Regarding the reform content, the project clearly states that in the public sector, executive and service jobs (requiring qualifications below intermediate level) will be implemented under a unified labor contract regime according to the provisions of the Labor Code (or service provision contracts), not applying the salary scale of civil servants and public employees.

The project proposes a new salary and bonus structure design including: Basic salary accounts for about 70% of the total salary fund; allowances account for about 30% of the total salary fund; bonuses are equal to about 10% of the total salary fund.

In addition, there will be a new salary system regulated by absolute amounts instead of regulating the salary coefficient multiplied by the basic salary according to job position, title and leadership position on the basis of adjusting the lowest salary and expanding the salary relationship to approach the market area.

Specifically, there will be a salary table for positions applicable to cadres, civil servants, and public employees holding leadership positions (elected and appointed) in the political system from the central to the communal level. A salary table for professional and technical positions for civil servants and public employees not holding leadership positions.

Three salary tables for the armed forces, including: 1 salary table for military officers, officers, and professional police non-commissioned officers (according to position, title, and military rank/rank), 1 salary table for professional soldiers, police technical specialists, and 1 salary table for defense workers and police workers.

The project also mentions the rearrangement of current allowance regimes, ensuring that the total allowance fund accounts for a maximum of 30% of the total salary fund.

The head of an agency, organization or unit is allowed to use the salary fund and regular expenditure budget allocated annually to hire experts, scientists and special talents.

At the same time, the project also allows the pilot expansion of the mechanism applied to a number of provinces and cities in dynamic areas to spend an average additional income of no more than 0.8 times and allows the implementation of salary fund allocation for agencies and units.

At the same time, abolish the additional salary coefficient for officials and civil servants of agencies implementing special financial mechanisms when implementing the new salary table.

The time for civil servants to use budget for non-salary expenses is over.

To implement these innovations, the Steering Committee has proposed a series of solutions such as completing the construction of a job position system to serve as a basis for salary payment according to position, title and job position.

Along with that are breakthrough solutions in finance and budget. Specifically, every year, priority is given to spending about 50% of the estimated revenue increase and 70% of the actual revenue increase of local budgets, about 40% of the central budget revenue increase for salary reform.

The remaining salary reform fund after adjusting the annual basic salary must continue to be used to implement the reform after 2020. Abolish non-salary expenses of officials, civil servants, and public employees originating from the state budget.

Reforming wage policy must be closely linked to effective implementation of streamlining and streamlining the apparatus.

In January 2017, the Prime Minister established the Central Steering Committee on reforming wage policies, social insurance and incentives for people with meritorious services, with Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue as Head; Minister of Home Affairs Le Vinh Tan as Permanent Deputy Head; and two Deputy Heads, Minister of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs Dao Ngoc Dung and Minister of Finance Dinh Tien Dung.