Both Sides Will Gain From Extension of Retirement Age
By Aniza Damis; P. Selvarani
MAY 1 may have been the best May Day in recent times after a 15- year struggle by civil servants for better perks bore fruit. ANIZA DAMIS and P. SELVARANI engage Public Service director-general Tan Sri Ismail Adam and Congress of Union of Employees in the Public and Civil Service (Cuepacs) president Omar Osman on what this means to the nation’s 1.2 million civil servants.
TAN SRI ISMAIL ADAM
Q: Does the 30-year pension payout apply to current retirees?
A: Yes, and if a pensioner dies, the dependant will get the derivative pension.
Before the recent announcement, if a pensioner died within 12 1/ 2 years of his retirement, the widow would get 100 per cent of the derivative pension. But beyond 12 1/2 years, the widow would only get 70 per cent.
But from Jan 1 next year, all widows and widowers who are currently receiving 70 per cent will get 100 per cent.
And if there is a coincidence of the two circumstances, that is, the maximum of 30 years and the maximum of 100 per cent, then, theoretically, a widow or widower might get a total increase of 71.4 per cent.
Q: Is this going to be backdated?
A: No. The calculation is going to be backdated, but the payment is not.
Q: So all pensioners are going to get three-fifths of their last- drawn salary, as opposed to just half?
A: If their service exceeds 25 years of service. They will get a new pension – to accommodate another five years of service. But they are not going to get any back pay from the time they retire. The number of pensioners eligible is about 310,000, whose service has exceeded 25 years.
Q: How much is it going to cost?
A: It will cost the government RM718 million. Currently, the government pays out RM5.2 billion in pensions.
Q: Where is the government getting the RM718 million?
A: There is money. It’s about priorities. The government deficit has always been about below three per cent. We’ve been prudent. There are reserves. But, of course, there are priorities.
Now, the present government has decided that this is a priority, so they are pushing it up. But some other programmes will have to hang on for a while.
Q: Isn’t RM718 million a lot?
A: Now that the retirement age is being extended by two years, there is actually a savings.
For the next two years, the government will not be paying them a pension, because these people are still going to be working.
And since people are not retiring, the government also saves on gratuity and cash-in-lieu of leave, because it is deferred.
Q: How much will the government save?
A: RM598 million in terms of pension in absolute savings, and RM1.2 billion in terms of deferred gratuity.
Q: Does this mean it would be cheaper to pay people to work, because you are only paying them 40 per cent extra on top of the pension they would otherwise be getting?
A: The savings comes from keeping people working and being paid for it, instead of receiving pension and doing nothing.
Q: Does that mean that a retirement age of 60 is a very close reality?
A: There are some issues to consider. In considering whether to allow people to work until 60, some feel that we should give these retirees some avenues for employment after retirement.
We want to make them employable, too. But if you put the retirement age at 60, their economic value, or the perception of people who are 60, may not be as good as if you retired at 58. If you retired at 58, you are still in the fifties – you can still work. That’s a perception.
So, there was some discussion that we put the retirement age at 58, and for those who want to seek employment at 58, it’s still a reasonable age.
But it doesn’t mean that people cannot get re-employed on a contractual basis with the government after 58. This practice will still go on.
For example, people in academia – professors, lecturers – they can work until 65 on a contractual basis after their compulsory retirement. If they are still healthy and relevant, of course.
Q: But has 60 been completely ruled out?
A: No. We never know. In the future, people might live longer and healthier.
It used to be 60 in the 1960s. Then they changed it to 55.
Q: So even a bloated civil service won’t be a problem?
A: “Bloated” is a perception. People say for a population of 27 million, 1.2 million civil servants is big.
If you look at the number, it looks big. But if you dissect the categories of the public service, you will understand that it is not big.
Thirty-six per cent of the 1.2 million are in education: teachers, lecturers. And the government policy is that you have to have a certain ratio of teachers to students.
Currently it is 1:40, one teacher for 40 students. But the government probably wants it to go to 1:30 or 1:25.
Then, 12 per cent are in healthcare; doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dentists. The government is also committed to a ratio of 1:800, the World Health Organisation standard. Currently, it’s about one doctor to 1,200 people, depending on the area. In the Klang Valley, it’s one doctor to 500 people.
Then you have another 15 per cent in security: military, police. These numbers depend on the security strategy of the country.
Right now, we want more policemen. The government decided to increase it by another 60,000.
Then you have people in enforcement – Immigration, Customs, local authorities, the Road Transport Department.
That accounts for about 10 per cent, too, at federal, state, and local authority level.
And the rest is everybody else in the administration: social workers, administrators, people in the Land Office.
Q: How will this encourage people who have served 30 years to stay on?
A: It depends on where you are. You might stay if you are in a strategically important position.
And it doesn’t matter at what level you may be. A clerk can also be very important. We have one hospital assistant at KLH (Kuala Lumpur Hospital) who is now 60-something, who is still working.
The important thing is that, if you are still relevant and making some difference, either you may want to work longer, or the government may want you to work longer.
Sometimes this happens – you have this coincidence of want. You want to work, and the government says you are still good.
Q: Do lower-ranking workers have any prospects of promotion to look forward to?
A: Every employee in the civil service will have the opportunity to be promoted one rank up at least once in their lives.
In the old days, you become a clerk; and if you are just a normal worker, you will retire as a clerk. In those days, the opportunity for promotion was not that many. But now, the government has decided that any job you enter, you have the opportunity to be promoted at least once.
Q: Now that civil servants have so many goodies – last year they got the highest ever increment – are they going to deliver the goods?
A: We’ll have to deliver. The present government will have to make sure that we deliver. People say we are not so good, but we have been an independent country for 50 years. And the country is doing okay. I wouldn’t say that it is excellent, because we are still in single-digit growth, but we are okay.
Look at the things that are happening in the country: our economy is not only private-sector run, we have big participation from the public sector – in terms of infrastructure, policies.
So, if you do the calculation, then the public service must be doing well. Otherwise, we would not have got that kind of development. Look at these common sense indicators.
Secondly, look at the results of our education system.
We find that students’ results are getting better. This means that the students are good, and so the teachers must also be good. On average, the teachers must be doing okay.
Put everything together and they must be doing some good. These students who are doing well, after SPM, go abroad either on scholarship or on their own, and they do well.
I am just looking at simple layman indicators.
Q: What gives some people the perception that the civil service is not performing well?
A: This is due to personal experiences. To the ordinary man, the government means the post office, the policeman at the roadblock, the clerk at the land office, the nurse at the clinic.
So, you have this bad experience, and you say the whole government is bad.
If you take your car to the garage, and the foreman or the mechanic didn’t give you good service, you say that the mechanic performed badly, you don’t say that the private sector performed badly. You don’t say all mechanics are bad; you say, “that guy was bad”.
Let’s say you have a bad experience at the pensions division. Pensioners normally get their pensions by the 18th or 21st (of the month). Recently, one or two pensioners got their pension on the 22nd, and they made a big thing out of that.
But the problem was that the bank was late in paying out the pensions.
Q: What has happened to the “service with a smile” principle?
A: We are supposed to smile. It has been there since independence. We have circulars, we have training.
In the past, to make sure customers were happy, we put in “fresh” (young) faces. But then the older ladies complained because they also wanted to be at the counters.
But still, sometimes you get sour faces.
I fly First Class on Malaysia Airlines. I still get a sour face from some of the stewardesses. It’s the same with the civil service. It may be a bad day for someone.
If you go to Hulu Selangor, the success story there is Sekinchan. It’s about 80km from Kuala Lumpur. Sekinchan has the highest padi yield per hectare in the country.
One of the success factors is the irrigation system that depends on the functioning of water locks. The people who maintain these water locks probably only have their SPM certificate. If they didn’t do their work well, didn’t follow the schedule, then the whole planting season would go haywire.
These are unsung heroes.
Making good of the goodies
OMAR OSMAN
Q: Is Cuepacs happy with the government’s Workers Day gift to civil servants?
A: Yes, and we are thankful to the government for meeting almost all our demands. We raised six issues – the RM2,000 honorarium, extending retirement age, request for full pension, housing allowance, critical allowance and the problem of the Efficiency Level Assessment (PTK). A side issue was the absorption of contract staff into the service. Of these six issues, the government agreed to five.
The only thing the government could not agree to was the RM2,000 honorarium. We have accepted the prime minister’s explanation that this was because of the increasing price of goods. If they were to give the honorarium, it would cost them an additional RM4.5 billion.
On the whole, we feel that this has been the best result so far in the history of the civil service.
On Workers Day last year, the government announced that salaries would be increased. On Workers Day this year, we finally got what we had been asking for over 15 years, especially the extension of the retirement age and the full pension.
Q: Are you disappointed that some of your demands, such as the housing allowance and extending the retirement age to 60, could not be met?
A: Not really. Although we had hoped that the retirement age would be extended to 60, we are still happy that it has been pushed to 58. The prime minister has also assured us that the government would address other issues such as the housing allowance in the Budget to be tabled in August.
Q: Why do you think it took some 15 years for the government to accede to Cuepacs’ demands?
A: I don’t know. Cuepacs has been fighting for these issues for a long time. I am the 12th Cuepacs president and each of us has our own way of approaching issues. Maybe my more aggressive style worked.
Q: What do you think about the unfavourable impression among some members of the public about civil servants being generally unproductive, inefficient and earning “gaji buta” ?
A: We admit there are some bad apples but it’s not fair to criticise the entire civil service as being rotten. You cannot get a civil service that is perfect. But at least now there has been a drop in the number of complaints against them.
There are many civil servants who work very hard but go unnoticed by the public.
The perks are not just a reward. They serve to motivate civil servants to working harder, to being more productive.
Now that they have received what they have been fighting for, they should prove themselves by working harder and being more productive and efficient.
We don’t want to get any more complaints from the public about the lackadaisical attitude of civil servants, the poor delivery system or indiscipline.
We have received a jab of motivation so we should work towards zero complaints.
There has to be a change in their attitude towards work and dealing with the public. Otherwise, the public will say: “Your pay has increased, your allowances have increased but your performance is still the same.”
As the umbrella body looking after the welfare of the 1.2 million civil servants in the country, we want them to take stock of their performance and improve on their weaknesses.
We are doing our best to help them but if they cannot shape up, then they will have to ship out.
Q: Will it be difficult to change their mindset after all these years?
A: It won’t be easy but it has to be done. They have to change the way they have been doing things, such as taking long tea and lunch breaks and disappearing from their work stations for long periods of time.
Where possible, we don’t want civil servants to take their tea and lunch breaks outside the office because this takes a lot of time.
And this is why we want each agency and ministry to provide a proper canteen for staff: one that is clean, air-conditioned and has a variety of food.
There are not enough canteens now but in some cases, the canteens serve horrible food. We cannot blame staff for going out for tea or lunch.
Q: How can the PTK assessment system be improved in the light of complaints against it?
A: The good thing is that the government has decided to do away with the exam for those from Grades 1-16. They will be assessed on daily work performance and the courses or seminars they attend.
From Grades 17-40, which form the bulk of the civil service, we propose that they be assessed after attending short courses related to the work they do.
For those who have served at least 25 years, we feel they should be assessed on their performance, skills and knowledge acquired during their years of service.
Under the current PTK system, everyone has to sit for an exam and has to get 37 of 40 objective questions right to be considered for promotion.
This is not fair on the senior civil servants who may have performed well throughout the years but failed to get promoted because they did not pass the PTK exam.
Why waste time and money to make them sit for an annual exam which does not reflect their capabilities?
We are now preparing a working paper on a proposal which we hope to submit to the Public Service Department (PSD) soon.
Q: With the retirement age being increased to 58 from July, what will happen to “deadwood”?
A: According to a (PSD) circular last year, any civil servant whose productivity is not up to mark because of poor health or inefficiency, will be sent for counselling.
But if their performance still does not improve after three sessions, they would be referred to the PSD.
Today, we have 11,000 civil servants under this category of non- performers. The department cannot take disciplinary action against them because their offences do not fall under this category.
For example, some frequently take medical leave but always produce a medical certificate.
We don’t want problematic civil servants to create more problems for their colleagues. If you cannot be of service because of ill health or because you are unproductive, it’s better for you to opt for early retirement and give others the opportunity to work in the civil service.
Q: What will the full pension based on years of service mean to civil servants and pensioners?
A: An additional income of at least a few hundred ringgit every month. This will help ease some of the burden from the rising cost of goods.
Many civil servants and pensioners are struggling to make ends meet. Some 30 per cent of civil servants are forced to moonlight as security guards, taxi drivers and petrol pump attendants because they can’t survive on their wages. With the revised pension payment, they now have some hope.
Q: What other issues would you like to see addressed?
A: We want the government to look into the housing allowance of civil servants who are occupying staff quarters.
All civil servants are given a housing allowance and those given quarters are entitled to half the amount. Unfortunately, there are some departments which are not paying this allowance to staff who are occupying quarters. We hope the PSD will look into this.
We also want the government to consider giving a special allowance to those doing enforcement work because of the dangerous nature of their jobs.
Right now, enforcement officers such as those in the Customs Department, Road Transport Department or local authorities are only given an ex-gratia payment if they suffer a permanent disability or die in the course of duty.
We feel they deserve some form of compensation should they be assaulted or injured while carrying out their duties. Right now, they get nothing if they are injured.
Q: Is there a good working relationship between the union and the government leadership?
A: We have a good working relationship with the top government management, including the PSD. However, I cannot say the same for some officers in the PSD who do not give union leaders the time of day.
Some department heads also discriminate against us. It is regrettable that they view us as interfering in the affairs of the department when we are there to look after the interest of our members.
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