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.<\/p>\n
Fitial disclosed this during his press conference Friday at his office.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have already given instruction to OPM to start processing wage reduction on all excepted employees,\u201d said the governor.<\/p>\n
Fitial said the number of excepted employees has drastically grown over the years, an indication that the government has been \u201cout of order.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m 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\u2019s 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,\u201d said Fitial.<\/p>\n
The government employs a total of some 5,000 people.<\/p>\n
EXIT CLAUSE<\/p>\n
Finance Secretary Eloy Inos said wage reduction is done \u201cthe minute a new contract is agreed to or negotiated.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not going to wait for anything,\u201d he said but noted that the administration intends to respect individual contract\u2019s exit clause\u2014a 30-day or 60-day notice. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe only thing we need to do is to make sure we preserve the contractual requirement, which is the exit clause,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Likewise, Inos said that \u201cit doesn\u2019t have to be a new contract.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
Excepted employees include political appointees and professionals that are on contractual basis.<\/p>\n
They are found in different departments and agencies.<\/p>\n
They include \u201cadministrative specialists\u201d and other technical type positions.<\/p>\n
Inos said that these are regularly classified positions that should be within the merit system but that are instead in the excepted system.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo there\u2019s a need to revisit the system. If they don\u2019t fall in that category, they should be in the merit system,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Doing this would result in government savings.<\/p>\n
If they are converted, almost or more likely than not, their wages will be reduced,\u201d said Inos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}