GAZETTE NOTIFICATION OF NEW PAY SCALE : Protesting employees miffed at being ‘ignored’ [ Tritiyo Matra News ]

GAZETTE NOTIFICATION OF NEW PAY SCALE : Protesting employees miffed at being ‘ignored’

Local December 18, 2015

Low ranking government employees on Thursday protested at the new pay structure for ‘ignoring’ their demands for reinstating timescale and selection grade and for reducing the total number of grades to 16 from 20.
They said the 8th pay scale, notified in a gazette on Monday, would further widen the salary gap among government employees and create discontent in the public services.
Terming the pay hikes ‘highly discriminatory’, non-cadre officers also said the new pay scale for the first time in 44 years of the country’s independence sharpened the conflict between cadre and non-cadre officers by upgrading the entry level of cadre officers.
‘We will work for an additional one hour on December 20 and abstain from work for one hour on December 21 in token protest against the discriminatory pay scale,’ Bangladesh Sammilito Sarkari Karmakarta Parishad president Md Shafiul Azam told New Age Thursday.
A section of the administration cadre is misleading the government and trying to create anarchy in the public service by downgrading non-cadre officers, he observed, saying they would announce fresh programmes from a press conference on December 22.
Cadre officers’ entry level has been upgraded to Grade VIII from the existing IX while the entry level for Class I non-cadre officers remains at Grade IX as per the draft 8th pay scale that also abolished the classification of employees into Class I, Class II, Class III and Class IV.
‘The overwhelming majority of the government employees are disappointed with the new pay scale as it has widened the salary gap between the maximum and the minimum pay,’ secretary general of Bangladesh Government Employees Coordination Council Nomanuzzaman Al Azad told New Age.
Moreover, low ranking employees with limited scope for promotion would be adversely affected by the absence of timescale and selection grade, he added.
The council leader said they would hold a representative’s convention next week to launch a country-wide movement against disparity in the new pay scale, which will be implemented from January 2016 with retrospective effect from July 2015.
The council in an emergency meeting on Thursday expressed its disapproval at the issuance of the gazette notification without reinstating the provision for timescale and selection grade.
Professional bodies of engineers, agriculturists and doctors and BCS Coordination Committee has also threatened the government with a ‘bigger movement’ across the country as their demands for removal of inter-cadre disparity from the new pay scale was not realised.
The professional bodies and the coordination committee, a platform of 26 Bangladesh Civil Service cadres, will hold a meeting in the city on December 19 to work out future programmes pressing their demands for removal of disparity from the new pay scale, the BCS Coordination Committee’s spokesperson SM Golam Kibria said.
The professional bodies and the BCS Coordination Committee have been agitating under a single banner since October 2015 for restoration of timescale and selection grade and removal of disparity from the new pay scale.
Aggrieved officers said the new pay scale would create disparity and cause resentment among civil servants, many of them engineers, teachers and doctors involved in various development activities.
Representatives of all BCS cadres, other than those of administration and foreign affairs, have been rallying for restoration of timescale and selection grade that would help them move to higher grades without any promotion.
In place of timescale and selection grade, the employees would move to higher grades after serving 10 years and then again after six years automatically, in case they do not get any promotion.
The Bangladesh Secretariat Personal Officers’ Association also protested at the new pay scale.
All of them demanded the prime minister’s intervention to resolve the issue of salaries and status of around 15 lakh public servants.