Salaries and Remuneration Commission to release new public service salaries

By Ally Jamah

Nairobi, Kenya: The Salaries and Remuneration Commission says it will soon release new salary figures for different cadres of workers in the public service.

SRC Chairperson Sarah Serem said Monday that job evaluations in the civil service are about to be finalised and would result in “radical changes” in the salaries of the workers.

“In line with the principle of equal pay for equal work, all categories of workers will have the same pay. For instance, accountants in all Government departments will have equal pay, no matter where they work. We are looking at jobs people are doing, not where they work,” she indicated.

Serem said currently, similar categories of workers within Government are earning radically different salaries and benefits, a situation which she termed as untenable.

“We understand that a worker in Nairobi may be doing more work than his or her counterpart in another part of the country. We will ensure that the compensation package reflects this,” she said.

Serem claimed that there are too many irregular allowances in the public service, saying SRC job evaluations have revealed up to 60 different types of allowances that were bleeding the Government of huge amounts of money.

“The allowances are too many. One can almost get an allowance for just coughing. We will do away with them and insist that allowances should not be more than 40 per cent of the total pay package,” she said.

Regarding parastatals, SRC said the huge disparities within the institutions have seen top management rake in millions of shillings every month, while salaries for some junior staff are even below the minimum wage.

Figures indicate that the public sector employs about 700,000 workers, representing 1.6 per cent of the total workforce. The public wage bill stands at Sh465 billion, slightly more than half of the total Government tax revenue of Sh908 billion annually.