Of government service and employability

The next budget announcement is round the corner, which may include a wide range of populist measures and electoral goodies. Among other things, the salaries of government employees may also be increased. Unconfirmed reports suggest that the magnitude of this increase will bowl everyone over!
It is important that the salaries of government employees, especially those of the lower cadre, keep pace with the inflationary pressures. The compensation packages of individuals working in the public sector need to be at par with their counterparts in the private sector. Some suggest that government service must command a premium, in order to attract and retain from amongst the best human capital available.
However, rather than employing inflation-indexed methods for budgetary revision in salaries and other allowances, the planners eventually cough up an arbitrary percentage increase. Reportedly, the FY13 budget may include the hike in government salaries as high as 35 percent even as various options for raising the allowances for house rent, medical expenses and conveyance are under consideration.
In essence, each new employment opportunity in government service is supposed to be created in the pursuit of better service delivery and improved governance. The issue with developing countries like Pakistan is that government jobs become a political tool and hence offer lifetime employment. This defies the very objectives of public sector employment.
Government is already a major employer in the country, employing over 2.5 million Pakistanis directly (excluding the PSEs). Over six lac people work for the Federal Government and the rest are with the provincial governments. Amid shortened working-weeks and increasing number of national holidays, increasing the salaries would mean that the state pays more for lesser work. In the absence of results-based management, the quality of public service is manifested in the form of governance breakdown which the citizens come across in many forms every day.
Dr. Mahathir Muhamad - Malaysias longest serving Prime Minister, under whose watch the archipelago experienced rapid growth, modernisation and international integration - believes that increasing the salaries raises the cost of production unless there is a corresponding increase in productivity. He opines that the West is in financial troubles because it has been overpaying its people. "During the government of a previous Malaysian Prime Minister, a 25 percent salary increase was given to government servants. There is no evidence that government revenue had increased by 25 percent. What this means is that the increase in operation costs due to the 25 percent salary increases have to be met through reduction of allocation for development", Dr. Mahathir wrote in a recent note on his facebook page.
No government can afford to provide lifetime job securities to its employees. Pakistans fiscal space is shrinking every passing day, so the fiscal reforms must include an assessment of the efficacy of the existing workforce. A better criterion would be to measure the employability of every worker, an idea explored in depth by the NYT columnist Thomas Friedman in his 2005 bestseller The World is Flat.
Employability is opposite in nature to lifetime job security. It is about an individual gaining a particular employment and maintaining it through his or her knowledge, skills, abilities and quality of work. In Pakistans context, an action study on employability across all cadres of civil service and broader public sector would be telling!