Ministry of Public Service and PSU tour yield fruitful results says minister

There is a boost of morale among public sector workers, according to Minister of the Public Service, Henry Charles Usher. The Minister and President of the Public Service Union (PSU), Dean Flowers, recently toured various governmental departments and units across the country. The visits were a part of the GOB initiative to show support to public officers and unionism. Today, Minister Usher explained that the visits were fruitful and resulted in positive conversations. 

Henry Charles Usher, Minister, Constitutional and Political Reform: “There are three purposes really to this tour. First of all it’s important to check on the working conditions of our public officers to make sure that the environment in which they are working is one where they can work efficiently, effectively. Also we want to make sure that the public can access those offices that need to access properly, make sure that if wheelchair access, these different things have to be in place. The second purpose of the tour is really to listen to their concerns, listen to their issues and hopefully answer some of those issues and concerns and it’s important for both the union and the ministry to be there because some issues would affect them union wise, some would affect through the ministry so it really is an opportunity for us to hear from them. And finally the third purpose of these tours is to impart on them certain information that’s coming out, certain issues that have been happening, general and specific issues. The president of the union spoke about the pension reform, he spoke about other issues that came up, the increments and so on so it’s an opportunity to listen to them but it’s also an opportunity to give them some more information on decisions being made by government. What is interesting is that the public officers, the culture of the public service seems to be improving and they are ready to do their job even better. They’ve been doing going through some difficult times with COVID with the high cost of living, inflation etcetera but they continue to show up, continue to do their work and they’re willing to work harder, they’re willing to do more in service of the Belizean people and we have to appreciate and acknowledge that and that’s what we try to do on these stores as well. What one takeaway is that they want to see that the services that they are being provided can reach a broader section of the public and I think that’s important. We visited certain offices the Ministry of Home Affairs we visited the Treasury Department there in Belmopan, we visited the fire department and the fire department has some very specific issues when it comes to human resources and the deployment of their fire officers and so on so I think those are issues that we’ll be able to address and we certainly want to improve all the areas that we can.”