The General Secretary of the Public Services Workers’ Union (PSWU) has called for transparency and fairness in the salary administration in the country.

Speaking on The Probe on Sunday, Bernard Adjei said that he cannot fathom why a small section of the population gets to take home huge sums of money as ex-gratia when the public sector workers served the country for 20 to 30 years with very little salary and under strenuous conditions do not deserve it.

Mr Adjei was speaking on the topic “Ex-gratia: Reviewing Article 71 in response to Ghana’s Austerity.”

He stated that “we should look at the other side of the issue which has to do with principles of salary administration. There should be transparency, relative fairness and equity and they are done based on the resources you have.”

“It is not about the issue of whether your contract is for a short time or not [as it is teh case for MPs]. If it is for a short time, it is still governed by certain principles and it is relative to other people who are also performing services,” he said.

Mr Adjei added that his outfit does not have a problem if Article 71 holders including Members of Parliament are paid what they deserve to earn.

However, “if it is done such that the little resource we have it appears that a certain group is allocated a chuck of that to teh disadvantage of the larger workforce,” he noted.

Mr Adjei said that his outfit will therefore continue to support the call for a review of Article 71 to deal with pay disparities between the Article 71 holders and other republic servants.