Salaries of civil servants: Need to be "broken" and rebuilt?

From July 1, the basic salary of State officials, civil servants and public employees will be officially adjusted to increase. In recent years, salary increase has become a burden on the budget when the total State budget expenditure on salaries is increasingly expanding, not being able to reserve a reasonable proportion for investment and development.

The story of salary is always hot because it affects the lives of millions of families, millions of wage earners in the State sector; and this is also an area that has a great influence on the development of the administrative management system and the construction of socio-economic development policies.

There are currently too many types of allowances that exist, accounting for a high proportion of the salary, losing the essence of the salary, many people have allowances that are larger than the salary. This situation leads to a lack of transparency in the salary system and income of officials and civil servants.

Because of the lack of clear regulations on job positions, it leads to a situation of "leveling" salaries, and the situation of increasing salaries for those who do not deserve it; periodic salary increases cause more difficulties for the budget.

For example, many young and capable officials are promoted to important leadership positions. However, because of their short working years, their salary will certainly be lower than that of their subordinates, even if they receive position allowances.

The general minimum wage (basic salary) applied to cadres, civil servants and public employees is no longer suitable. It is time for salaries to be paid for each specific job position. In reality, there are job positions that have to undertake very complex, difficult and important tasks but the salary is low, sometimes equal to that of a person who "goes to work with an umbrella in the morning and comes home with an umbrella in the evening".

Not to mention the way of calculating salary based on coefficients, according to the scale of the main specialist, senior specialist or regular specialist, there are also many shortcomings. Because in reality, there are jobs that do not require university graduates but are undertaken by main specialists, even senior specialists. This causes huge waste and is unfair among members of an agency or unit.

The current way of paying salaries is not based on work efficiency, regular salary increases... leading to the situation of "playing for fun, eating for real", "living long to become a veteran", working long, getting high salary... Because there is no accurate and transparent measure to evaluate work efficiency, it is impossible to streamline anyone in the system of agencies receiving salaries from the State budget. This is also the reason why reforming the management system, improving the quality of the system's operations... is more difficult, even stagnant.

Everyone admits that the designed salary scale system is still egalitarian and leveling, not really creating motivation to improve the working efficiency of employees, not suitable for job positions, titles and leadership positions. With the current way of paying salaries, we are stuck in a reality of not having enough money to pay the talented and capable people while "wrongly paying" salaries to the weak.

Therefore, it is necessary to rebuild the way of calculating salaries for cadres, civil servants and public employees, even though we know it is very difficult./.