How to get a satisfactory salary, for the right person, for the right job
In the past time, salary policy reform has been concerned and resolved by the Party and the State. The lives of cadres, civil servants, public employees and armed forces have been gradually improved, thereby contributing to political and social stability and ensuring the smooth operation of the state apparatus.
However, according to the Department of Salary and Social Insurance (Ministry of Home Affairs), the results achieved to date have not fully met the set goals. The number of beneficiaries of salaries and allowances from the State budget is increasing, the total salary and allowance fund accounts for a large proportion of total budget expenditure, but the salary level calculated according to the current regime is still low. After arranging the organizational structure, especially when implementing the 2-level local government model, the workload and tasks of many positions, especially at the commune level, have increased significantly.
Delegate Nguyen Thi Mai Hoa - Deputy Chairwoman of the National Assembly's Committee for Culture and Society said that the rearrangement of the apparatus (bringing district officials to communes, merging commune-level administrative units) poses very high requirements for the capacity and ability to undertake the work of grassroots officials. The pressure and workload at the commune level are currently very large.
Therefore, there needs to be breakthrough solutions in training and fostering, promoting the spirit of self-study and self-training of the contingent of cadres to meet the requirements of the assigned tasks. In particular, going hand in hand with the requirement of capacity is the preferential treatment policy. Salary reform work needs to be implemented substantively so that cadres can feel secure in their work and contribute. "We have spent a lot of time on salary reform, but currently it is still only towards the future. How to make salaries satisfactory, for the right people, for the right jobs, and enjoy the right income" - delegate Nguyen Thi Mai Hoa said.
Bottleneck" in the public sector salary mechanism
From the perspective of research and training in public human resource management, Dr. Doan Van Tinh - Deputy Head of the Faculty of Human Resource Management, Academy of Public Administration and Management - believes that the current income situation of cadres, civil servants, and public employees is a major concern of the Home Affairs sector.
He assessed that although the Party and State's efforts to reform salaries in the past time have been very large, including the increase in the base salary from July 2024, the income of many senior civil servant groups has not yet approached market value. According to Dr. Doan Van Tinh, the core cause lies in two structural "bottlenecks".
The first is the "deviation" in the process of transforming the management model. "We are in a transitional phase from the "career" model to the "job position", but the current salary payment mechanism is still heavily based on average thinking and is too tightly compressed," Dr. Doan Van Tinh assessed. The current salary scale does not really value labor based on the pillars of the market, including the complexity of work, actual capacity and output efficiency. The consequence is that seniority mainly increases the salary coefficient according to the term, but does not accurately reflect the added value in the contribution of workers.
The second is the problem of fiscal space and labor productivity. Despite efforts to streamline staff, the pressure on the state budget's recurrent expenditures is still very large. Current resources mainly prioritize social security and compensate for price slippage, so there is not enough space to design breakthrough preferential policies to attract and retain high-quality human resources. When labor productivity in the public sector has not been comprehensively measured and optimized, increasing income at a high level becomes a difficult macroeconomic problem.
From the perspective of modern human resource management, Dr. Doan Van Tinh believes that low wages not only affect personal life but also pose long-term risks for the public sector. He warned of the risk of "asymmetry in the flow of talent", when the public sector may become an initial training place but cannot retain personnel in the ripe stage of a career. Besides, there is the risk of resource dispersion and the decline in motivation to contribute as the relationship between workers and organizations gradually shifts from "service" to "transaction".
From that reality, the requirement for salary reform in the public sector is becoming increasingly urgent. According to Dr. Doan Van Tinh, to improve income in a substantive way, it is necessary to establish a clear priority order in reform, with a focus on completing job positions, innovating the mechanism for evaluating work efficiency and gradually eliminating egalitarian thinking in income distribution.
