37 P.C. Of Fiji's

Budget Goes

On Salaries

From a Suva Correspondent Fiji for 1964 has a recurrent dget of £9,413,918, but of it ,480,083, or 36.96 per cent., es in personal salaries and yments. This startling inf or ation was revealed in a report

ade by Sir Alfred Savage and

r. C. A. Grossmith, who spent t months in Fiji as a Salaries ammission for the Civil Service. r ET those figures do not represent the full cost of the employment civil servants. Together with leave, isages, pensions, subsidised quarters d other overheads the Civil Service sts the taxpayer £F4 million a IT.

And the cost of the civil service increasing at a greater than normal awth. In 1955 the recurrent budget is £5,832,426, and personal emolu mts cost £1,749,419, or 29.9 per at.

Despite this trend the commis mers recommended increases for a mber of grades of officers, mainly the lower or junior categories, and imated that these, if adopted by i legislature, would cost £350,000 £375,000.

About £300,000 of that would go the “junior” scales.

Recommendations The commissioners’ recommenda ms included: • A 5-day, 40-hour week for overnment servants (to be modified 82-hour fortnights of 10 or 11 lys if necessary). • The establishment of an or misation and methods unit. • The restriction of overseas leave issages to Australasia for future cal entrants (at present, depending i conditions of employment, officers e entitled to United Kingdom leave intervals). • Equal pay for men and women achers and prison officers.

In their examination of the cost : passage grants, the commissioners ime up with some surprising infor lation, and said there could be big ivings.

For example, a local officer in the :ale £560 to £735 a year, taking

pension, leave, passage and living-in in Government quarters, was actually in receipt of £926 a year, and there were similar increases for higher scales.

For expatriate officers it was even better: An officer on £1,060 with in ducement allowance, paid by the UK, pension, leave, passage, educational visits, quarters, actually received £2,355; at £1,475 the officer received £3,378; and on £1,875 he received £4,178.

The commissioners found unequal work for the same pay, and unequal pay for the same work. Senior staff spent an appreciable amount of time on purely routine duties.

They were informed that there had been inadequate training, and a lowering of standards because of the rapid expansion of the Civil Service in the last 10 years.

They also referred to the ad vantage the expatriate has through inducement allowances paid by the United Kingdom Government and mentioned the case where a deputy head of a department, an expatriate, received more than the head, a local.

But they left the overall impression that Fiji is not getting the best return from a service which is costing £4 million a year—a point which many people not in the Fiji Civil Service had been claiming for years.