The Mozambican Minister for the Economy and Finance said today in parliament that cases of reduced net salaries in the civil service were due to the tax burden applied to salaries paid under the new Single Wage Scale (TSU).
Max Tonela was speaking during the urgent parliamentary debate on the “risks of paralysis of the civil service” convened at the request of the bench of the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), the main opposition party.
“In view of the rise in the amount of the base salary resulting from the implementation of the reform, taking into account the combined effect of the existence of progressive tax regime and deductions for retirement, we recorded some situations of reduction in net salary,” he said.
Those cases, he continued, particularly affected professionals in the special regime career, namely doctors, magistrates and teachers linked to the research area.
Max Tonela explained that, within the scope of the TSU, the Government sought to incorporate subsidies into the base salary, with the aim of ensuring that workers enjoy comfortable retirement pensions, but this increase in salary led to an increase in the tax incidence.
“The remuneration of a considerable group of civil servants was composed, for the most part, of non-pensionable subsidies, which left them exposed to drastic reductions in their quality of life on retirement,” he stressed.
The implementation of the TSU sought to remedy this situation and to value the professions, which resulted in the evolution of the base salaries of all professional groups.
“There is, in this context, salary increase for all public servants that due to their function had salaries below the foreseen in the single salary table, having been assured the salary irreducibility, for the others, meaning with this that no public servant had or will have his salary reduced,” highlighted Max Tonela.
The Minister of Economy and Finance considered that some of the complaints presented by public servants regarding the new salary scale were legitimate, highlighting that some of them were due to procedural flaws, others resulted from interpretation and others resulted from expectations management.
The Minister of Economy and Finance reiterated that the TSU is part of a reform that pursues the objective of valuing and retaining the best civil servants, correcting salary imbalances and eliminating the proliferation of own remuneration statutes approved in a discretionary manner.
The urgent debate on the “risks of paralysis of the civil service” comes in a context in which several professional classes in the civil service are contesting the TSU, due to framework errors, elimination of subsidies and salary reductions.
The Medical Association of Mozambique has rescheduled for 5 December the national strike that was scheduled for Monday after advances in negotiations, but still awaiting a response to several claims.
In letters published in several media outlets, groups of teachers also threatened to paralyse classes and boycott the exams of the academic year about to end, in protest against the TSU.
The Mozambican Association of Judges (AMJ) threatened on Monday to challenge the new remuneration matrix, considering that the instrument “calls into question the constitutional status of judges.
