The Fair Wages and Salaries Commission(FWSC) Thursday engaged selected editors in Accra on its operations.

The engagement was to abreast the editors of the mandate and activities of the Commission ahead of its payroll monitoring exercise.

Mr Benjamin Arthur, the Chief Executive Officer of the Commission, took the editors through the objectives and functions of the Commission and called for partnerships with newsrooms towards the effective engagement of the public on the role of the Commission in ensuring fair wages and salaries.

He said the Commission had saved a lot of money for the State through the removal of ‘ghost’ names from the payroll and called for support for the payroll edit.

Mr Arthur lamented situations where some government workers regularly absented themselves from work, but were validated for full salary payment at the end of the month.

He said in some cases, decentralised offices in some districts were perpetually locked, but the workers were religiously validated for salary payment ever
y month.

Mr Arthur said the situation must change,insisting that workers’ pay must be linked to productivity.

He said salary and allowance negotiations were just about 20 per cent of the mandate of the Commission and that its ‘huge’ task of salary and wage management needed the support of the media.

On industrial actions, especially in election years, Mr Arthur said the Commission had no issues with legal strikes, but the intention must not be to ‘jeopardise the system’.

The nationwide payroll monitoring, which started last year, is to detect and eliminate fraud or anomalies on the payroll.

Mr Arthur said the wage bill was reduced by an average of 1.2 per cent from April to August 2023 during the exercise, translating into an equivalent of about GHS36,108,000.

FWSC is the Government of Ghana’s mandated organisation for the determination and management of salaries for all public servants whose salaries are drawn from the consolidated fund.

It also advises government on all salary-related matters in the
country.

Source: Ghana News Agency