Investing in wages is investing in development

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Dr. Bui Sy Loi

After 4 times of salary reform, how do you evaluate the salary reform policy from July 1, 2024?

Wage reform in current conditions is good news for officials, civil servants and public employees, creating motivation for officials, civil servants and public employees to work, promoting increased labor productivity and attachment to the office. In reality, the salaries of cadres, civil servants and public employees are still not enough to meet the needs of life; it is very difficult to create a team of professional, diligent and effective civil servants. In addition, the fact that the main salary is lower than or equal to the allowance makes it impossible to clearly determine the nature of the salary and does not accurately represent the true value of the salary. Therefore, the immediate and necessary task is to accelerate the pace of wage policy reform to ensure the lives of workers. At the same time, to ensure that salaries are paid commensurately, reflecting the true value of the labor of officials, civil servants, and public employees, it is necessary to change the structure of salary scales, salary coefficients, and salary differences between occupations and fields to ensure compatibility with the labor costs of those who dedicate and contribute to the state.

It can be affirmed that investing in wages is investing in development. Salaries are so low that officials and civil servants have to work many jobs to earn more income. In addition, low wages are not enough to live, leading to the consequence that cadres, civil servants, and public employees lack motivation to work and do not contribute their best because the salary does not reflect the true value of the labor that this force contributes to agencies and units.

The nature of civil servant salaries is that with the development of the market economy, salaries must approach the value of market labor, and must aim for fairness and substance. It is necessary to establish a minimum wage for administrative civil servants equal to labor capacity. Accordingly, for areas with labor relations, wages must meet the minimum living standards of workers and their families (according to the provisions of the Labor Code). For the public sector, spending on salaries for officials and civil servants is spending on development investment.

Therefore, salary reform must be truly an important motivation to motivate officials and civil servants to improve their capacity, perform public duties more effectively, and reduce corruption, which ensures a living wage so that cadres, civil servants and public employees do not have to work part time or corruption and wholeheartedly perform the functions and tasks assigned according to their job positions, industry and field.

What do you expect from this salary reform, sir?

When reforming salaries, we will have a salary schedule for leadership positions and a professional salary schedule. Senior experts are people with special abilities and qualifications in their industry and field of work. Senior experts can have high salaries, even salaries equivalent to Deputy Ministers and Ministers to encourage people with professional qualifications. It is very necessary to build a team of senior experts who are talented, capable, and do in-depth research without necessarily striving to become managers.

Therefore, building a worthy salary schedule for a team of senior experts will encourage them to contribute to more and feel more secure in their work. The goal is to attract talent and take advantage of the capacity of highly qualified people to contribute to the process of building and developing the country. The problem is to properly assess quality capacity, professional qualifications, or in other words, leading experts in the industry cannot be widely published.

To achieve the set goals when implementing salary reform, what issues do you think we need to focus on?

Wage reform still faces many challenges. That is, the payroll is still large, the organization is not streamlined, and there are still many public service units that the State must support, but have not yet been able to transition to autonomy and self-responsibility; public investment to improve the infrastructure system...

In the future, in my opinion, it is necessary to continue to rearrange the organization and apparatus, and streamline staffing according to Resolution 18-NQ/TW on a number of issues on continuing to innovate and reorganize the system's apparatus. Streamlined political system, effective and efficient operations; and Resolution 19-NQ/TW on continuing to innovate the organization and management system, improve the quality and operational efficiency of public service units, and create resources to reform salary policies . Focus on perfecting job positions, titles, and working positions as a basis for this reform.

For salary reform to be feasible and effective, it is necessary to consider the characteristics of public service units, the goal of ensuring salaries are distributed according to work capacity and training process, ability to contribute and ensure correct principles of distribution according to labor and salary arrangement according to job position. That will ensure the goal of wage reform is to ensure that workers have enough salary to live on their salary; In particular, it is necessary to consider regulating specific types of allowances for specific industries and fields; to retain workers working in those fields or attract talented people with professional qualifications to the public sector to overcome the situation of a part of officials, civil servants, and public employees moving from the public sector to the private sector (such as the health and education sectors after 2 years of the Covid-19 pandemic); The cause is low income and difficult life due to slow wage reform. This requires high determination from the entire political system, in which units need to build appropriate employment positions and human resource management. The process of implementing wage policy reform must be synchronized with the process of reforming administrative procedures, applying information technology, digital technology, and digital economy to minimize manual labor and increase labor productivity.