Headlines:
| New budget looms |
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| Monday, 21 September 2009 | |
 With a day to go before
the much dreaded budget cuts are made public there are rumblings that Cabinet
has signed off on the various areas to be affected without consulting key
stakeholders. Finance Minister Audley Shaw is scheduled to table the First Supplementary Estimates during Tuesday's sitting of Parliament and it will reveal which programmes and projects will get less funding this financial year as the cash strapped Bruce Golding administration moves to cut expenditure by $17 billion. However, there are howls of protest coming from trade unions that the Government has acted in breach of the Public Sector Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Trade union officials who represent public sector workers say they are not happy about being left in the dark on changes which will have to be made to the civil service after the revised budget is presented Tuesday afternoon. Gov't has no respect for the MOU - Morrison  The National Workers
Union (NWU) is one of the unions that are objecting to the manner in which the
Government has handled the process especially in light of speculation that a
cut in public sector jobs is likely.Vincent Morrison, NWU President says he expected that the MOU Monitoring Committee would have been consulted before Cabinet gave the green light to the revised budget. "Something as important and massive as this programme is being contemplated without any discussion, any dialogue with the MOU Monitoring Committee as is a condition of the MOU. I really believe that this is something that shows that the Government basically has no respect for the MOU," Mr. Morrison said. Budget cuts & the fire brigade recruitment programme In the meantime, another trade union is seeking answers on whether recruitment exercises which were planned for some sections of the essential service will be put on hold in light of the cut in spending.  The Jamaica Association
of Local Government Officers (JALGO) is particularly concerned about the fire
service whose personnel it represents.Helene Davis-White, General Secretary of JALGO said there are plans to recruit more fire fighters but it is unclear whether this will still take place due to the budget cuts. "The (Jamaica) Fire Brigade had advertised last year and are in the process of selecting persons for training (as) is in keeping with an agreement in the MOU that the Government would recruit, in an effort to fill the ranks of the fire brigade, recognizing the extreme shortages in the brigade. We wait to see whether the training programme that was to have gotten underway will be one of the casualties," Mrs. Davis-White said. |