Minister blames delayed migration onto SSSS on lack of data

The Minister of Employment and Social Welfare, Mr Enoch Teye Mensah, has slammed some institutions in the public sector for the slow pace at which they are providing data to enable their employees to be migrated onto the Single Spine Salary Structure (SSSS).
He did not name the institutions involved but said the situation was leading to accusations that the government was deliberately slowing the process to defer the implementation date of the SSSS to next year.
Consequently, Mr Mensah said the ministry had planned to hold meetings with those institutions in the next few days to resolve the sticky points which were preventing them from providing the necessary data to fast-track the implementation process.
Speaking at his turn at the weekly meet-the-press series in Accra yesterday, the minister said the reluctance of those institutions to submit data for the migration was due to the fact that they did not have evidence of approval for some of the current allowances they were enjoying from the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning.
He said another reason for that attitude was the unauthorised use of internally generated funds by some institutions to pay allowances not approved by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning and said some of the institutions feared that the disclosure of those unapproved allowances would lead to their withdrawal by the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC).
Mr Mensah hinted that by the end of December, five more institutions, comprising the GRATIS Foundation, the Ghana Dance Ensemble, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), civilian employees working with the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) and the Irrigation Company of Upper Region (ICOUR), would have been migrated onto the SSSS.
He said to meet the demands of the oil and gas industry, the Management Development and Productivity Institute (MDPI), as part of its mandate, had developed a training course for which 3,000 people had been registered to begin training by the first quarter of next year.
He pointed out that the institute would also run various Masters degree programmes in general management for public service officials, adding that through that programme, the institute intended to re-position itself as one of the training institutions providing relevant skills training and knowledge for public sector workers.
On the National Vocational Training Institute (NVTI), the minister said this year alone it had provided skills training for 9,648 trainees in the field of instructor training, school-based apprenticeship, defensive driving and on-the-job-training.
He announced that Ghana had been taken off the list of countries identified by the United States Department of Labour Executive Order 13126 to be using child labour for the production of cocoa.
He said that became possible after Ghana had established the National Programme for the Elimination of Worst Forms of Child Labour in Cocoa which put in place measures as a direct response to international agitation and the possible boycott of Ghana cocoa on the world market.
On the Osu Children’s Home, Mr Mensah said following media reports of neglect and abuse in the home, a committee was set up to investigate the allegation and it had since presented its report to him. He stated that a White Paper on it would be released in the next few days.
The minister took the opportunity to touch on other departments and agencies under his ministry, including the Labour Department, the Department of Social Welfare, the Department of Co-operatives, the Department of Factories Inspectorate and the MDPI.
Others are the NVTI, Integrated Community Centres for Employable Skills (ICCESS), the Opportunities Industrialisation Centres (OIC), Ghana and the Ghana Co-operatives College.