US crisis won't affect 50% government pay hike

MANILA, Philippines – The financial crisis in the United States will not affect the government’s plan to increase the salaries of its personnel by at least 50 percent over four years, Budget Secretary Rolando Andaya Jr. said yesterday.

“We will go ahead with the increase. It won’t be affected by the financial crisis and the expected fallout on the local economy,” he said.

In fact, Andaya said the proposed P1.415-trillion 2009 budget included P20 billion for the first phase of the four-year salary adjustment program.

“Government employees can expect to get the first installment of the increase in July next year,” he added.

Next year’s adjustment will amount to about 20 percent. For a Teacher 1, the basic monthly pay would go up from P12,026 to P14,083; Teacher 2, P12,748 to P15,040; Master Teacher 1, P17,059 to P19,594; and Master Teacher 2, P19,168 to P22,381.

The four-year salary adjustment program would cost taxpayers a total of P109 billion.

Andaya said public school teachers, numbering about 522,000, comprise the single biggest group that would benefit from the program.

The second biggest group would be members of the Philippine National Police (PNP) and Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), he said.

He said a government accountant who now gets a basic pay of P12,748 would receive an increase of about P9,000, while a medical officer and a legal officer, who have the same salary of P15,181, would get P29,353.

However, the biggest increases would go to higher officials, including Cabinet members, Andaya added.

“The increase in salaries will be more substantial for the professional and executive level considering that their compensation lags far behind those in the private sector,” Andaya stressed.

“These positions, which perform critical policy-making and service-delivery functions, are the ones we are fast losing to outside competition,” he said.

Andaya said the plan, once implemented, could stem the migration of professionals in government, like health care providers, to the private sector.

“We are losing our professionals like teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, and accountants because of low salaries in the government. Our executives receive much less than a manager or CEO (chief executive officer) in a private firm. Government is therefore having difficulty attracting and retaining highly qualified employees,” he said.

Salaries of Filipino health workers are so minuscule, if compared to their counterparts in highly developed countries, he stressed.

“Talent will have the irresistible desire to go where the job market is.

“The fact is a nurse in the US gets paid more than what our president is getting,” Andaya explained, referring to the P57,000 basic monthly salary of President Arroyo, which is equivalent to about $1,200.

Andaya, who was a three-term Camarines Sur congressman and chairman of the House appropriations committee before President Arroyo named him as budget secretary, noted that it was his late father, as appropriations committee chairman, who worked for a general government-wide pay increase in 1994.

The elder Andaya’s pay adjustment plan increased the basic pay of public school teachers from P3,000 to P8,600, and doubled the lowest pay in government to P4,000.

Secretary Andaya noted that in the past 30 months, Mrs. Arroyo has increased government salaries “three times, or once every 300 days on the average.”

“As a result, an ordinary teacher’s salary has increased by P3,087 since January 2006, that of an Army sergeant by P3,383, and that of a medical specialist by P5,043,” he said.

“To the ancient calls for a P3,000 salary hike for state workers, the records would show that, by and large, we have complied with that, and the challenge left for us now is how to top it,” he said.   – With Delon Porcalla