Civil servants must be paid their salary
Ms. Pham Thi Hoa, 27 years old (residing in Thanh Tri, Hanoi) is a civil servant of a public service unit in the education sector in Hanoi. After nearly 5 years of graduation, her current salary is about 8 million VND/month. According to her, this amount of money is just enough for basic personal expenses, completely unable to cover the tuition fees of her two young children.
Currently, her youngest child is only 2 years old, studying at a private preschool in Hanoi with a fee of about 6.5 million VND/month. On days when she comes home from work late, her family has to pay an additional 100,000 VND for each overtime shift, causing the total cost of raising her young children to increase significantly.
Her eldest child is studying at a public school in her hometown (Vinh City, Nghe An) and is supported by the State for tuition according to current policies. Therefore, the amount that parents have to pay is mainly boarding meals and classroom funds, a total of 170,000 VND/month.
However, to keep up with her friends, she had to register her child to learn English as a supplement. Each month, this amount alone spends about 1.8 million VND for 20 classes.
"If I only rely on the salary of civil servants, I will not be able to pay my children's tuition, let alone arising expenses such as boarding, documents or contributions at the beginning of the year. Almost all expenses depend on my husband's income" - she shared.
Not only Ms. Hoa, many officials at schools, hospitals or other public service units also said that their current income must be very frugal to maintain a minimum standard of living.
Meanwhile, tuition fees, service prices and living expenses have all increased, causing financial pressure to increasingly weigh. Many people are worried that prolonging this situation will make them struggle to stick with the profession, even though they really want to stay in the public sector for a long time.
Mr. Le Quang Trung - former Deputy Director in charge of the Department of Employment (Ministry of Labor - Invalids and Social Affairs, now the Ministry of Home Affairs) - said that the salary policy deserves to be one of the important factors to attract talent to public sectors; demonstrates recognition, evaluation and honor of talent; is an important driving force for talented people to stick with and contribute; contributes to streamlining the apparatus and improving the quality of cadres.
Therefore, salary reform is a breakthrough in attracting, using and treating talent; it has strategic significance in attracting, using talent and developing human resources, improving labor productivity.
"It is necessary to assess the practical issues that are being raised in improving management efficiency, including the issue of salaries for cadres, civil servants, and public employees; how to help them do the right thing and fulfill their duties and responsibilities well and also receive worthy salaries" - the expert emphasized.
Confusion in how to determine job position
According to Associate Professor, Dr. Le Minh Thong - former Assistant to the National Assembly Chairman, to build a team of elite cadres, the prerequisite is to have an elite civil service. In fact, the civil service is showing many basic bottlenecks, in which the core is not determining the standards for the job position system.
"We have talked about the civil service according to job positions over the past two terms, but in reality, the whole country has not yet formed a true job position system. Many agencies only list what they are doing and then call it a job position, which is not in line with nature" - he commented.
According to him, it is the confusion in how to determine job positions that makes salary reform difficult to implement synchronously. The current salary mechanism still mainly relies on the ranks and ranks of civil service, while advanced countries have paid salaries based on work value, position and productivity.
"We want to pay salaries according to job positions, but there is no clearly defined job position system. It is difficult to reform salaries effectively when this platform is not yet complete" - Associate Professor, Dr. Le Minh Thong assessed.
