Public service employees took home an additional Sh32.2 billion in the year that ended June 2024, mainly driven by salary review agreements approved by the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC).
New disclosures by SRC show that in the financial year that ended June, salary increments accounted for 80 percent of the additional pay or Sh25.8 billion followed by Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs) at Sh4.41 billion or 13.6 percent.
Employees attached to various government offices have increasingly pushed for salary review agreements because they need to be cushioned against the rising cost of living.
But SRC’s decision to approve the agreements in the year ended June is one of the factors that increased the overall public wage bill by an estimated Sh71 billion.
Approval of the agreements has flown right across the face of the government’s efforts to control the ballooning public sector wage bill.
“SRC received 79 requests from public institutions, nine of which were on CBA reviews (11 percent); 62 on allowances and benefits (79 percent), five on bonus requests (6 percent), and three on salary reviews (four percent),” SRC says in the wage bill review of the last quarter of the recently ended financial year.
SRC says that it received a total of Sh52.01 billion worth of requests, meaning that it approved 61 percent of these appeals.
Some of the requests included CBAs for the university staff under the Universities Academic Staff Union and the Kenya Union of Domestic, Hotels, Educational Institutions, Hospitals and Allied Workers. SRC has over the years defended decisions to approve salaries of government workers because they need to be compensated for inflation.
This (salary reviews) highlights the good times for government workers even as their counterparts in the private sector grapple with stagnated pay despite the skyrocketing cost of living.
For example, official data shows that a worker in the private sector took home Sh57,204 per month last year, compared to Sh58,678 in 2022 and Sh62,796 in 2019.
The National Treasury has over the years been struggling to contain the public sector wage bill in a bid to free up more funds for development projects.
The additional pay for government workers in the year ended June was more than seven times higher than the Sh4.27 billion approved in the 2022/23 financial year.
SRC said that the public sector wage bill was anticipated to hit Sh1.17 trillion in the 2023/24 financial year, up from Sh1.1 trillion a year earlier.
In a bid to contain the ballooning wage bill, the Treasury has frozen recruitment, saying that government agencies and ministries and agencies must seek approval from the Treasury before hiring afresh.
The freeze was first announced a decade ago and has been a key focus area for the National Treasury, amid questions on the basis of increasing salaries for existing staff and locking unemployed millions of Kenyans from job opportunities.
But the freeze on recruitment has largely been ignored with workers in the national government hitting 992,900 as of June last year, a growth of 4.71 percent from 948,200 a year earlier and 842,900 in June 2018.
