advancement by declining to accept promotion.
This we submit
would provoke dissatisfaction leading to inefficiency
serving" and serious problems of administration in the
Department.
10. Observations on Proposed Scheme.
露
we are loathe to believe the local Government to be
desirous of depressing the salaries, allowances and pensions
of its officers under the guise of "Unification of the Colonial
Service". Unification implies not only equality of salaries
but also equality of responsibilities and opportunities of
promotion.
We are of the opinion that it is not possible to
achieve, with equity, any genuine unification between Colonies
which are so widely separated and which are in many respects so
fundamentally different.
scheme:
We beg to submit the following observations on the
For example the Directors of
(a) Unification does not appear to have been effected
even in West Africa, which is used as the basis of the scheme,
since the remunerations and Pensionable Emoluments of similar
posts there, vary considerably.
Public Works in Nigeria, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and Gambia
receive respectively £1,800, £1,500, 21, 20 and 21,05u per
annum. Similar differences appear in many other posts of the
same nomenclature. This forces us to the conclusion that the
relative responsibilities of officers in the West African Group
have been acknowledged. We consider that the greater
responsibility carried by officers in Hong Kong compared with
those in west Africa has been entirely overlooked when fixing
the proposed new scales of salary for the Engineering Staff of
this Department.
(b) Further, it is believed the West African Scales
have not been adopted generally in the Crown Colonies. In
Malaya, it is understood officers are still being recruited on
73