Low civil servant salaries: How to improve?

We talk about salary reform many times. But when it comes to "where is the money?" then stop. This is a challenge that must be overcome.

Former Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Thang Van Phuc emphasized this at the workshop "Context and possibility of salary reform".

With the presentation entitled “Fundamental reform of salary policy for cadres, civil servants and public employees in the period of 2011-2020 - problems and solutions”, Dr. Thang Van Phuc, former Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, said that the current salary of civil servants does not reflect the true value of their labor - a special type of labor - powerful labor. Therefore, the social values ​​of civil servants are reduced, making the effectiveness of public service implementation low, vulnerable and creating a land for bureaucracy and corruption to develop, which has become a problem in the country's development process. Therefore, it is necessary to promptly fundamentally reform the current salary policy.

Giving an example of the fact that current civil servant salaries do not reflect the true value of their labor, Mr. Phuc said: "The salary of a retired Deputy Minister is currently not equal to the salary of a Lieutenant Colonel."

Current civil servant salaries are not enough to live on, but many people really want to work in government agencies.

On the other hand, according to Mr. Phuc, the design of the salary system, salary levels, and salary-based allowances is increasingly showing inadequacies and contradictions, not reflecting the job positions of officials and civil servants. This leads to the reality: “Many times we discuss salary reform. But when it comes to "where is the money?" we stop. This is a challenge that must be overcome.”

The solution proposed by Mr. Thang Van Phuc is to have specific steps in the process of salary monetization, and non-salary income must be controlled. The main principle is to have new breakthroughs in redesigning the salary scale system to be simpler and more suitable.

It is necessary to conduct a general review and streamline the state organization and payroll, and resolutely separate state administrative management from production and business management of state-owned enterprises and public service careers.

“Overseas, people only need to rent a few floors of a building to accommodate a ministry-level agency. Meanwhile, in our country, we spend thousands of billions of dong building headquarters, causing a waste of the state budget,” said Mr. Phuc.

Along with that, it is necessary to monetize legal and legitimate income such as housing, services, telephone, travel, medical care... For state management leaders, public vehicles are not yet calculated at the level where private service vehicles are arranged and for key state leaders.

"There needs to be strict regulations on other non-salary incomes from legal activities (scientific research, reporting, bonuses, gifts exceeding regulations...) to implement income tax payment and thereby implement regulations to monitor non-salary incomes" - Mr. Phuc emphasized.

Also related to the consequences of low wages, according to Dr. Tran Dinh Thao, this is the reason leading to the phenomenon of "brain drain" from the state sector to the non-state sector, at the same time it is the reason for difficulty in attracting talent and causing negative phenomena, corruption, creating obstacles in administrative reform in our country.

In his opening speech, Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Tran Anh Tuan emphasized: Reforming wage policy is one of the key programs of administrative reform. In recent times, wage policy reform has always been a matter of concern for the Party and the State. However, wage policy is a very difficult issue, related to many administrative, public service and civil servant reforms. When reforming wages, we cannot ignore it.

According to the leader of the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Law on Civil Servants and Public Employees has many innovative contents in the management mechanism such as determining job positions. In addition, a new principle is to determine the title standards with job positions to better manage the payroll. The salary policy and salary regime have undergone 4 reforms. Each time, the salary regime has been improved and innovated one step further, but it is always closely linked to the management mechanism of the civil servant team./.

According to VOV