With a re-examination of the size and operations of the government bureaucracy having been set in motion, spurred by the Government's ballooning wage bill, Jamaica's top civil servant says the new size and shape of the new public sector should be clear in five months' time.

His comments come even as public-sector unions warn that any major job cuts would hurt the Government and impede service delivery, a clear sign that the process will be a rough slog and is likely to be fraught with clashes.

"I would expect that by the next financial year, the prime minister will see results," said Cabinet Secretary Douglas Saunders, who is 16 months into the job.

The process is being marketed by the Government as a structural review, to be led Prime Minister Bruce Golding himself.

The public sector comprises 117,000 government-paid workers.

But outside of the PM's late-September presentation in Parliament saying the police and some health-sector workers were not central to the contemplated cuts, no one is confirming the groups most likely to lose their jobs.

Ambassador Douglas Saunders ... says the review would be wrapped up in five months.

national output

The Government initially programmed $125.7 billion for wages for 2009-2010, a figure which, although 11 per cent of the value of total national output, has since risen to $157 billion, according to Golding.

About 60 per cent of the wage bill goes to paying teachers, police and health-sector workers.

Saunders has said that initially, the Government will be looking for reorganisation and staff reductions first at ministries and public-sector agencies that depend on funding from the Government - a statement that covers much of the state bureaucracy, as very few agencies are self-financing.

Chris Zacca, who dropped his private-sector job with Gordon 'Butch' Stewart's business empire to take up an advisory position to the prime minister just this month, will play a major role in the reconfiguration and public-sector downsizing, Daryl Vaz, the minister with responsibility for information, announced last week.

Golding, on September 30, ended months of hedging on whether public servants would be sent packing when the Government was forced to jack up, by $6.3 billion, the $555 billion 2009-2010 Budget presented earlier this year.

no redundancies in the public sector

"In crafting the Budget earlier this year, I gave an assurance that there would be no redundancies in the public sector this year. Since then, we have been confronted with new wage settlements for teachers and nurses that add a further $16 billion annually to the public-sector wage bill, not including retroactive payments," Golding told lawmakers.

"This wage-bill burden cannot be sustained, or else we will do nothing else but pay salaries and service debt."

In late August, Golding, echoing earlier declarations that state job cuts were not part of any talks with the International Monetary Fund, told a Gleaner Editors' Forum that the Government would spare government workers the axe this financial year.

"We gave a commitment that we would not cut the civil service and this is in relation to this fiscal year. It was in part a trade-off for the position we had to take that we would not be able to pay the seven per cent wage increase," he said.

"... It was part of what we hoped would have been a bargain; we have to maintain that."

But at the time, the prime minister did not rule out nudging some government-paid employees, tempted by the prospect of full pension benefits, to walk voluntarily, ahead of the wholesale job losses expected to take effect March 31, 2010.

Speaking with Sunday Business last week, Ambassador Saunders steered clear of any comment on measures to be pursued this fiscal year to start trimming the service.

He was also mum on what percentage of the 117,000 strong public-sector workforce the Government would like to shave.

"The prime minister, in due course, will deliberate on that," Saunders said.

Wayne Jones, the Jamaica Civil Service Association president and acting head of the umbrella labour group, the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions (JCTU), has waded into the debate, latching on to the PM's acknowledgement that some jobs were secure, to suggest that the Government's bark might be worse than its bite.

Wayne Jones ... says public sector should be re-engineered, not cut.

disaggregating the numbers

"When the prime minister struts out a 117,000 number, it seems big, and it seems as though the public sector is overwhelming, but when you disaggregate the numbers, you are talking about some areas you cannot cut," Jones told Sunday Business.

The civil service union head noted that of the 41,353 positions in the central-government establishment, 10,800, including 1,000 empty posts, were police personnel, while a little more than 10,000 were health-sector workers, including doctors, nurses and dietitians.

The remaining 20,000, he said, were administrative posts in the various ministries and agencies. It appears that it is on this civil-service group that the axe will fall.

The rest of the public sector includes 22,000 teachers - no one is expecting cuts within that group; and some 53,000 jobs in state agencies, some of which are expected to be on the chopping block.

Prime Minister Bruce Golding ... will personally oversee jobs review project. - File photos

But Jones is warning the government that in sending home these workers, it could very well hurt its capacity to deliver services.

"When you cut people, remember you are cutting service delivery, too," he said.

"Can this country afford to undermine the already inadequate service delivery? My answer to that is no."

accusing the administration

The interim JCTU head is accusing the administration of not knowing what it wants from its bureaucracy, suggesting the talk of cuts is a premature knee-jerk reaction.

"Cuts come when we determine what we need; right now we don't know what we need," Jones asserted.

He suggested that the Government's administrative machinery was in need of "re-engineering, not cuts".

Despite the pronouncement from the cabinet secretary on the tight timeline for sending government workers packing, Jones is not convinced that the deadline will be met.

"We have a history in this country of having announcements preceding action by years," he said, describing Golding's job-cut plan as "a pie in the sky".

The union leader is urging the Government to engage the workers' representatives and to do so early, a position endorsed by the head of another government workers' union.

"It is the usual knee-jerk reaction," said Helene Davis-Whyte, general secretary of the Jamaica Association of Local Government Officers (JALGO).

JALGO represents more than 5,000 workers in parish councils and central-government departments.

"If you talk about saving billions of dollars, you would have to send home everyone," said Whyte.

"It is difficult to see where the cuts will come from. So I couldn't even hazard a guess."

dionne.rose@gleanerjm.com