.
A lot has been said about the “evil” Troika inspectors and the conspiracy by “Troika-supporters” to demolish all that has been achieved in the labour market of the past few decades. At the same time, wise economists have repeated what members of the troika, particularly the IMF, has been telling us all this time – abolish counter-productive and rigid wage benefits, reform the pension fund and balance the pay-scale between the overpaid, under productive civil servants and the overworked, underpaid private sector.
With the salary scale often in the range of 40-80% above private sector employees, civil servants work less and enjoy all the benefits of state favouritism, ie. untaxed retirement golden handshake, free access to public hospitals regardless of pay grade and automatic wage hikes, despite all governments’ pledges to freeze increases.
It is now clear that the public sector union chiefs are directing the smear campaign against the troika delegations, putting the fear of God into members, saying that the foreign inspectors are here to abolish the COLA automatic wage indexation system, take away their 13th salaries and tax their retirement nest eggs.
Come to think of it, COLA is a nuisance and an obstacle to innovation and productivity, the 13th salaries should be withheld for at least two years and civil servants’ privileged retirement bonus should have been taxed ages ago, just as private sector worker’s retirement funds are. If everyone gets a pension, why should civil servants get a double one, tax-free?
It is ironic that civil service leaders keep on threatening that they will expose all tax dodgers, especially high net worth individuals, in order to raise the funds that Inland Revenue maintains as ‘uncollected’ in its books, while we have yet to see this threat materialise. Could it be that union chiefs backed down when they saw whose names they would expose or is it that the list and the amounts were far from reality?
As long as private sector union leaders remain serfs to their public sector peers, labour issues will never be resolved in Cyprus, especially the disparaging gap between ordinary workers and civil servants. In which case, we will have IMF teams and troika-like inspectors visiting us more frequently until we can convince that austerity measures will be taken and Cyprus will no longer be a burden on its European partners and international creditors.
