By Keile Campbell

Journal Staff Writer

Minister of State for the Public Service Pia Glover-Rolle said there are many reasons why some promotions for social services workers are on hold, which include finances and lack of documentation.

“There are a number of reasons that promotions could be outstanding: it could be financial costing. In most instances, it could be a lack of documents and waiting for the ministry to bring those documents back in to complete the file. Then, of course, I’d like to say that we’ve continued the process of 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 said.

“The Ministry of Works, I’m happy to say, that we’ve completed all of the recommendations that we would’ve received for that ministry. Simultaneously, we’re working on service wide promotions, which encompasses the entire public service. Every ministry, every department, every island, we’re working on the AS assessment completion and we’re planning a number of other assessments. So, this is an ongoing process.”

Glover-Rolle’s comments came during a meeting held between Bahamas Public Service Union (BPSU) President Kimsley Ferguson, Minister of Social Services Obie Wilchcombe, Minister of Health & Wellness Dr. Michael Darville and Head of the Labor Relations Unit.

The meeting was held in response to last week’s protests where healthcare and social workers demonstrated outside the House of Assembly, where they demanded promotions and better work place benefits.

Glover-Rolle said the meeting between the public workers union and government addressed issues brought to light by last week’s protest as she revealed more.

“In regards to social services, there’s two groupings; there is the employment program which is the temporary work program, and as we know, temporary work programs in the public service have not been temporary. People have been on these temporary work programs for extended amounts of time. Years in most instances. So, in regard to the social service regulation exercise, which is the employees on the UR program, 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,” Glover-Rolle said.
She added that processed social service promotions remains at 136, while 37 remain outstanding – unchanged since last week when the Ministry of Public Service released a statement updating Bahamians on the same matter of concern for social services workers.

Glover-Rolle said while her ministry maintained “good working relations” with trade unions, she encouraged them to come in, even if it has to be on a weekly basis, to let them know of any issues just in case there are matters that the Ministry of Public Service is unaware of so that they may be addressed.
 
She added that promotion exercises haven’t been conducted for a number of years, so when they happened, persons assessing submissions for promotion responded positively.