Representatives of staff of the Ghana Health Service from today are expected to hold discussions with the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC)on their migration onto the Single Spine Salary Structure (SSSS). This was announced by the Chief Executive of the FWSC George Smith-Graham when he appeared on Multi TV’s current affairs program, PM EXPRESS. According to him, a scheduled meeting with union representatives from the GHS Thursday will be used to finalise the “grading structure after which we will start the migration process for Ghana Health Service.” Mr. Smith-Graham noted that “from these discussions we’re having, once we conclude these discussions, it is expected that they should be able to complete everything and probably be paid maybe in August. It will depend on how fast the payroll officers and HR officers will also be working but I know Ghana Health Service is a very organised place so they should be able to work very fast to get these things done.” According to him, the FWSC is working hard to get the Forestry Commission and the Judicial Service onto the pay policy by next month. The process for migrating the Forestry Commission onto the spine, he noted, has been completed “from their end and FWSC is going through doing the checking, immediately we’re done with the checking we’ll send it to Ministry of Finance and to Controller for them to be paid.” He added that the Judicial service is also “done with their mapping and we’re going through what they have done and making sure that everything is correct.” The FWSC Boss explained that owing to the complex nature of the structures at the tertiary institutions, they have had to revise the migration strategy for this category of workers. “If you take the tertiary institutions - the lecturers, senior staff, junior staff, it’s an entirely complex environment so what we’re doing now is we have certain understanding with the Vice Chancellors as well as the rectors of the various Polytechnics and we’re only working on the other groups, the TEWU members, FUSAG members and all the others, we want to separate the two and migrate them... immediately onto the single spine and then we’ll tackle the lecturers.” Mr Graham explained that since the migration of workers onto the pay policy began in July last year, 43 institutions out of the 105 have been migrated, representing 69 percent. He said the Commission has set a target to finish the migration by close of the year. Story by Shirley Agyen/ Multi TV/ Ghana