The Tribune

By EARYEL BOWLEG

Tribune Staff Reporter

ebowleg@tribunemedia.net

STATE Public Service Minister Pia Glover-Rolle said the Department of Social Services recommended that 129 temporary workers be made permanent, 92 of whom are currently being processed.

Her comment came after disgruntled social services and healthcare workers demonstrated outside the House of Assembly last week.

The public servants, which included Ministry of Health dental department employees, called for hazardous pay, scarcity allowance, and the regularisation of workers.

Mrs Glover-Rolle said there were meetings with the Bahamas Public Service Union president and other officials last week to discuss the matters. She also said she met with the head of the dental health department within the Ministry of Health.

“So in regards to social services, there’s two groupings,” she told reporters before a Cabinet meeting yesterday. “There is the employment programme, which is the temporary work programme, and as we know, temporary work programmes in the public service have not been temporarily. People have been on these temporary work programmes for extended amounts of time - it’s years in most instances.”

“So in regard to the social service regularisation exercise, which is the employees on the UR programme, we have received 129 recommendations. Ninety-two of those are currently being processed. So they’ll be awaiting approval, and then we have another 12 or so that are not quite in the pipeline yet, because we’re still waiting on documents or the like.”

“We have social services promotions. It remains at 136 that have been processed. There are 37 that are outstanding for various reasons, and there are a number of reasons that promotions can be outstanding. It could be financial costing, in most instances, it can be a lack of documents and waiting for the ministry to bring those documents back in to complete the files and then, of course, I would like to continue to say that we continue to process promotions across the public service. We had the finance officers that were recently completed, with only about seven remaining again pending documentation or other matters.”

She added that officials are working on promotional exercises for the entire public service.