Report on public sector wages must not determine failure of Single Spine – GSS

The Government Statistician, Professor Samuel Kobina Annim has warned that the latest statistics on salary disparities in the public sector must not be used to determine the success or failure of the Single Spine Salary Structure (SSSS).

“We did this work having in mind the single spine which is based on the deployment of a universal salary structure… Let us not use this revelation that inequality from a public sector salary point of view is 22 percent so the single spine didn’t work,” Professor Annim said on the Citi Breakfast Show on Friday.

A new report by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) has revealed that four out of every five public sector employees earn less than GH₵3000 a month.

Out of the 688,000 persons employed by the government, 533,179 of them earn less than GH₵3000. This represents 80 percent of the total workforce.

The new survey titled the Ghana 2022 earnings: inequality in the public sector also revealed that 104,349 people earn between GH₵3000 to GH₵4999, while 20,606 persons earn between GH₵5000 to GH₵9999.

The report indicated that 6,225 people earn over GH₵10,000 a month.

Prof. Annim however, believes that the statistics on wage disparities will help in shaping national policies and setting the development agenda.

“It is relevant information that will help us understand how we can streamline public sector earnings and how we can relate it to growth. In the past, we have been calculating inequality from the consumption point of view now we want to use administrative data to augment what we have been doing in the past to get a variety of earnings and inequality statistics to inform our development.”