Installed President Irfaan Ali today from State House grounds lashed out at calls from the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) and the Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) for an urgent meeting to discuss the recent 7% pay hike, after an absence of salary increases in two consecutive budgets by the PPP regime.
In his statement Ali instead labelled the Unions as “political operatives’, while seeking to justify a 3.5% pay increase per budget, compounded by a 14% increase in the cost of basic food items according the 2021 economic mid-year report and an almost 7% inflation rate.
Guyanese Economist Sydney Armstrong of the University of Guyana speaking to journalist Kurt Campbell recently on the issue of the pay hike, stated, “The context matters. And the context is we’re living in a world with growing inequalities: inequalities in income, inequalities in health and inequalities in education, inequalities in wealth, so when we offer these proportional increases, 7% for everybody, it sounds fair but given the backdrop we’re talking about it is rather unfair especially to the people at the bottom.”
The economist said that a 7% increase for a person earning $500,000 and another earning $100,000 multiplied by a year and “the gap between these two individuals gets wider. As you progress within the years, 5 years, 10 years, the income gap widens and so you continue to perpetuate inequality.”
