The pay revision for State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) is at par with the civil service. This means the basic pay percentage hike is in between 6 and 35 per cent. The finance ministry announced the revision along with a few other changes at the Meet the Press session today.
Besides revising the salary, the finance ministry introduced a Performance-Based Variable Incentive Allowance (PBVI) for the SOEs. The allowance will be based on the annual performance of a company. It will include not just the financial aspect but social mandates as well since some companies have more revenue than others. The finance ministry is in the process of devising the key indicators for the allowance.
The PBVI will be 15 per cent for underperformance, 25 per cent for good, 35 per cent for very good and 50 per cent for excellent.
“The current salary structure of the SOE is that some companies used to get position-specific allowances and that is not applicable to all the companies. Some companies used to get company-specific allowances and these are mainly tagged with the profits made by the companies. So the companies that are actually making a profit are getting the company-specific allowances whereas the rest of the companies with the social mandate are actually not getting that,” the Finance Minister Namgay Tshering said.
He also said in the new pay structure, the 25 per cent corporate allowance is now replaced with 20 per cent housing allowance.
“Looking at the history and after seeing why corporate allowance was given, we found out that corporate allowance was given in lieu of housing allowance because corporate employees did not get housing allowance like civil servants.”
The minister added that the SOE employees will still be paid higher than the civil servants.
“Before the pay revision, the SOE employees used to get 7 to 8 per cent more than the civil servants. Now the SOE employees will get 10 to 15 per cent more than the general civil servants. But we have to be mindful because we have teachers and health workers under civil servants. So when we say general civil servants, this is exclusive of the pay raise provided to the teachers and health worker.”
The pay revision will come into effect from December 1.
Kinley Dem
