PUBLIC SERVICE SALARIES

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22269, 7 December 1937, Page 15

PUBLIC SERVICE SALARIES

TO THE EDITOa Of THE PBESS. Sir, —Your leading article advocating increases of salary for heads and the higher officers of the Public Service, is, I think, untimely. The passage you quote from the Public Service Commissioner's annual report, in support of the above, was doubtless a natural sequence to the Government's appointments from outside the service of officers at salaries ranging from £ISOO to £2OOO per annum; but only one of these positions was advertised, and other circumstances of the appointments since disclosed suggest that it is by no means certain that equally good men could not have been obtained at much lower remuneration. If these appointments, which have been the subject of much criticism, are going to be used as a lever for a considerable increase in the cost of the Public Service at a time when we are on the edge of a fall in export prices then I say it is wrong and quite 'opposed to the interests of the taxpayer, which you have always guarded. Two wrongs do not make a right. , , _,, , . It has to be remembered that in 1933 the full cuts were in operation, which, being on a percentage basis, naturally reduced the margin between the higher and lower salaries and probably led to the then Public Service Commissioner's remarks, which you also refer to; but the cuts have since been fully restored. , The ever-growing burden of taxation general and local, will one day awaken the outside public, employers and employees alike, to the sacrifices of their living standards to support a correspondingly increasing, highly paid, and privileged general and local public service.-Yours, eta^^ December 6, 1937.