Wage cut for excepted employees

Gov. Benigno R. Fitial has ordered the Office of Personnel Management to begin implementing a 10-percent wage reduction for excepted employees or non-civil service government workers.

Fitial disclosed this during his press conference Friday at his office.

“I have already given instruction to OPM to start processing wage reduction on all excepted employees,” said the governor.

Fitial said the number of excepted employees has drastically grown over the years, an indication that the government has been “out of order.”

“I’m quite surprised myself when I saw the number of excepted employees because when the CNMI government came into being, there were only very, very few excepted employees. The rest were civil service. But now, when I looked at the number, it’s almost the same. The number of civil service employees went down. The number of excepted employees went up drastically. What does that mean? We are out of order. This government is out of order. We are going to bring it back to order,” said Fitial.

The government employs a total of some 5,000 people.

EXIT CLAUSE

Finance Secretary Eloy Inos said wage reduction is done “the minute a new contract is agreed to or negotiated.”

“It’s not going to wait for anything,” he said but noted that the administration intends to respect individual contract’s exit clause—a 30-day or 60-day notice.

“The only thing we need to do is to make sure we preserve the contractual requirement, which is the exit clause,” he said.

Likewise, Inos said that “it doesn’t have to be a new contract.”

“The first rule of business is try to see how we can fit these employees back into the civil service system. Bring them back to civil service pay scale and so forth and align them with responsibilities so that we hire people based on merits, and not the exemptions,” he said.

Excepted employees include political appointees and professionals that are on contractual basis.

They are found in different departments and agencies.

They include “administrative specialists” and other technical type positions.

Inos said that these are regularly classified positions that should be within the merit system but that are instead in the excepted system.

“So there’s a need to revisit the system. If they don’t fall in that category, they should be in the merit system,” he said.

Doing this would result in government savings.

If they are converted, almost or more likely than not, their wages will be reduced,” said Inos.