TEMPORARY CIVIL SERVANTS

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 144, 21 June 1938, Page 8

TEMPORARY CIVIL SERVANTS

(To the Editor.)

Sir,—ln your issue of November 1 last the Rt. Hon. M. J. Savage was reported as having said that no one section of those serving the State should be given precedence over any other section. "We are dealing with all of the people who serve the State in the whole, not with any one section. We are dealing with them now, and we are not going to run away from it." Contrast this official declaration with Mr. Savage's statement as telegraphed from Dannevirke on Saturday by your special reporter. The Prime Minister was speaking at a civic reception at Dannevirke on Friday evening, and he is reported to have said:—"lf civil servants want a tribunal to look after questions affecting their grading, the Government will be pleased to let them have one"; and he added that as a result of the regrading he found people whom he never knew existed. "Even after we thought we had done the job," he said, "certain groups, casual workers, for instance, came along and said they had received no benefit from it. It seems to me that there should be a tribunal to accept this responsibility and take it off the Government's shoulders."

Here we have a straight-out declaration that the Government "was not going to run away" from a specific job, and a definite admission that the job had not been done, but that if the public servants wanted it done they would have to do it themselves.

Now, Mr. Savage did not inform his audience that when temporary officers of the Service appealed to him to right the wrong that had been done them, they were informed that the question of their claims for retrospective pay was a matter for decision by the Public Service Commissioners. It is common knowledge in the Service that many hundreds of appeals have been made regarding the regrading, and, in other instances, the abrupt refusal to consider claims for retrospective pay. Temporary civil servants would be unlikely to accept the offer of a tribunal unless the Prime Minister personally nominates its members who should be unconnected with the Civtf Service.—l am, etc.. <

ONE OF THE VICTIMS.