Richard Lord

Moves are afoot to in­crease the salary of the Prime Min­is­ter and all oth­er MPS. This, as the Salaries Re­view Com­mis­sion (SRC) be­gins a re­view of the terms and con­di­tions of of­fice-hold­ers un­der its purview, in­clud­ing MPs. Leader of gov­ern­ment busi­ness in the Sen­ate, Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Em­manuel George, tabled the Nine­ty-Sixth Re­port of the Salaries Re­view Com­mis­sion yes­ter­day.

An April 3 cir­cu­lar let­ter is­sued by the Par­lia­ment con­firmed the re­view of salaries. "We are ad­vised that this mat­ter will be the main sub­ject un­der con­sid­er­a­tion when the House com­mit­tees of both Hous­es meet lat­er this month," the let­ter said.

The Par­lia­ment al­so is­sued a ques­tion­naire, which it said "seeks to ob­tain da­ta pri­mar­i­ly on the quan­tum of time Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment spend on par­lia­men­tary du­ties. The in­for­ma­tion sought will as­sist the com­mit­tee and our re­searchers in the prepa­ra­tion of a com­pre­hen­sive pro­pos­al for the con­sid­er­a­tion of the Salaries Re­view Com­mis­sion."

The cir­cu­lar let­ter told MPs the com­mit­tees were "in­ter­est­ed in hear­ing from you and in ob­tain­ing your opin­ions and sug­ges­tions." MPs are asked to com­plete and re­turn the ques­tion­naire by April 13. They are be­ing asked to say how many hours a week they spend prepar­ing for a sit­ting and how many hours they spend at sit­tings.

The last pay hike for min­is­ters and MPs was in 2006, when the Prime Min­is­ter's salary was in­creased to $48,000 a month; Cab­i­net min­is­ters' salaries in­creased to $33,00 a month and non-Cab­i­net min­is­ters to $27,000. The Leader of the Op­po­si­tion moved to $23,800, MPs (non-min­is­ters) in­creased to $14,000 and sen­a­tors (non-min­is­ters) $10,500.

The Gov­ern­ment has been fac­ing protests for sev­er­al months from pub­lic-sec­tor work­ers who were op­posed to a lim­it of five per cent on their salary in­creas­es. The Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union se­cured a nine per cent in­crease in salary for work­ers at Petrotrin and the Na­tion­al Pe­tro­le­um Mar­ket­ing Com­pa­ny, and the In­dus­tri­al Court award­ed a sim­i­lar in­crease to the union for work­ers at T&TEC.