St Kitts-Nevis PM joins 'non-established workers' pension meeting

The government in St Kitts and Nevis hopes to improve the conditions of more than 1,200 government auxiliary employees (GAEs) by implementing a pension plan.

This category of worker is not currently entitled to a pension when leaving government work.

Yesterday Prime Minister Timothy Harris – who is also the country’s minister of finance – attended the pension committee’s first meeting.

Chief personnel officer Torfrida Rochester explained the plan for GAEs, who have been known previously as non-established workers.

“It was promised that the government will undertake to pay the employees 3% until there was a salary review and so in reality the 3% would be an interim increase but the government had promised that it would give a salary increase so that the three percent deduction would be no burden for the auxiliary workers,” she said.

“It should have been at that time upon the increase that the government auxiliaries begin to pay their contributions.

“What happened after that is, we went through a series of meetings… and we tried to put something into existence, what could be terms and conditions relating to the plan.

“We also had meetings to try to do a new Pensions Act to accommodate the new regime and to get some regulations done.”

Prime Minister Harris said that the issue has been outstanding for too long and correcting is important.

“It is about a good time as any that we try to expedite the process to bring this formally into play and the cabinet is anxious that we are able by September 1st [2017] to be able to make firm determination in terms of an implementation date,” Harris said.

“We have to look at the body of non-established workers that are on record at this time and how we can bring them some justice in terms of their expectations that they would have had a pension.

“Their situation in my view is even more serious because as we understood it from about 2012, the government then had brought an end to the payment of their holiday pay.”

Within the Civil Service Pension Plan for Auxiliary Employees, persons will receive a pension when they retire.

The new pension plan is a defined contribution plan, where both the employer and employee each contribute 3%.

GAEs retirement benefits will be a combined payout of their contributions and the government’s contribution plus any interest.

In the case where an employee would not have contributed enough to receive a satisfactory minimum pension, that employee shall also receive “a compassionate gratuity”, the government has said.