Of proposed salary increase

Hard work doesn always pay off, especially if the hard work is being performed in a high-inflation economy with limited prospects for business growth. As businesses struggle to survive in these dogged economic times, the salaried class employed in the private sector has had to contend with fewer jobs, stagnating salaries on one hand; and rocketing inflation on the other.
But, while the purchasing power of hundreds of thousands of people employed in the private sector has been sliced, salaries of government employees have been raised 110 percent since the current government took office.
Not to say that increasing salaries of government employees is a bad measure. But, consider that the government has been unable to control the widening fiscal deficit and has made up for this chasm by crowding out the private sector through record borrowing from scheduled banks. The governments reliance on loans from domestic sources has choked whatever little appetite for borrowing that had survived the dismal state of law-and-order and political volatility.
Shockingly, unshaken by the heavy strain government borrowing is putting on local businesses, the Federal Government has been reported to be considering salary hikes ranging between 15 and 35 percent for government employees. Economists estimate that such a move could cost as much as Rs.80 billion to the Federal Government, besides forcing the provincial governments to announce similar increases.
Consistent salary hikes without any consideration for performance of individual employees has emboldened some quarters to an unreasonable extent. The All Pakistan Clerks Association has already announced it will take to the streets if their salary increment is anything less than 200 percent.
On the other hand, public sector enterprises are in such bad shape that the cumulative losses incurred by Pakistan International Airlines, Pakistan Railways and Pakistan Steel Mills have been reported to have swelled to the size of the countrys defense budget. Far from taking steps to rationalise the work force and consolidate operations, the government has added even more employees to the PSEs.
Last year, when a journalist asked Defense Minister Ahmed Mukhtar how the government would bring down the employee-to-aircraft ratio for PIA which appears abnormally high compared to other airlines, the Minister responded, "we shall buy more planes". Obviously, the planes never came and PIA went from "great people to fly with" to "great many people to fly with".
Yet the single-minded fixation with the upcoming elections appears to be blinding Islamabad which has even received "advice" from the provinces that such salary hikes cannot be managed given the current fiscal position.
Yet another salary increment for government employees may motivate them to vote in favour of the status quo in the upcoming elections. But millions of others who have seen the worth of their hard-earned money diminish substantially; a long hard look at their empty wallets is in order before reaching for the ballot box.