Accra,- The Single Spine Pay Policy (SSPP) a policy for salary administration for public sector institutions will soon be going through review.
Dr Edward Kwapong, Chief Executive of the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission, said the review will focus on the factors used in job evaluation and the guidelines for implementation as well as other critical areas to enhance the policy.
He said the Commission hopes to widen the consultation process during the review to enable more people to understand the policy and for easy implementation.
Dr Kwapong said this when he educated frontline media persons on the policy.
The SSPP has been criticized to have inequalities in terms of salaries and it has not had a smooth implementation process.
Dr Kwapong, however, said the policy had the objective of enabling the government to reward employees in accordance with the principle of “equal pay for work of equal value” consistent with article 24 (1) of the 1992 constitution.
He said that most workers embarked on strike without adhering to the principles in the SSPP and explained that most of the allowances demanded by some government sector workers were already consolidated into the basic salary under category one arrangement.
“During the migration of institutions onto the SSPP all identified category one allowances were consolidated into the basic salaries of job holders. This was aimed at discontinuing the payment of these allowances since they had already been factored into the basic salaries through the 13 factors of the job evaluation.”
Dr Kwapong explained that category two and three allowances were job related allowances paid under special conditions that arose from time to time which required special compensation.
He mentioned acting allowance, additional duty allowance, permanent transfer allowance, overtime allowance and training allowance as examples while category three allowances were specifically related to the welfare of the employee.
Some category three allowances include physically challenged transport allowance, medical subsidy, out of station allowance, vehicle maintenance allowance, protection clothing allowance and funeral grant.
Mr Earl Ankrah, Ag. Director for Research, Monitoring and Evaluation and Head of Public Affairs at the FWSC expressed his appreciation to his “colleagues” for their blunt opinions.
He encouraged frontline media professionals to sit through policy formulation programmes in order to make vital input, since the nature of their work brings them “up, close and personal” to the real needs of the citizenry, on a daily basis.
Source: Ghana News Agency
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