COMPLETE REGRADING

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19455, 14 October 1937, Page 15

COMPLETE REGRADING

DOMINION PUBLIC SERVICE UNIFORM SYSTEM SOUGHT PROBLEM FOR CABINET (Parliamentary Reporter.) WELLINGTON, this day. For several years the Public Service has been hoping to secure a complete regrading of positions and the long process has now reached a point closely approaching finality, the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. M. J. Savage, stating to-day that he had received a report of the uniformity committee of the Public Service on this question. The report is being submitted through the Public Service Commissioner. The uniformity committee consists of the heads of the more important State departments, and its conferences have been aimed at making the conditions of employment and salary approximately the same in all branches of the Public Service. “The Government has now to go into the whole position,” explained the Prime Minister, “and I am bound to say that the public servants have not been fairly treated in the past. Regrading has been held up and the public servants have had to suffer. We have inherited this amongst a thousand and one other sins of outpredecessors.” When it was suggested to the Prime Minister that regrading of the Public Service involves a fairly substantial extra expenditure he replied that the Government recognised that it would be an expensive process. “It is expensive now,” he concluded, “but it was cheap in the past at the expense of the public servants. Regrading is one of the immediate Cabinet matters, and we have to see that everyone gets a decent standard of life, whether in the Public Service or out of it.”