Understaffed and overworked - Inadequate parliamentary personnel causing burnout, difficulty to do nation’s business
Published:Sunday | October 4, 2020 | 12:14 AMEdmond Campbell - Senior Staff Reporter
While debate rages over the chairmanship of sessional committees of the Lower House, some disgruntled staff of the country’s bicameral legislature have shared with The Sunday Gleaner the difficulties they face as they extend themselves beyond the call of duty to keep the wheels of governance turning.
As the Government contemplates plans to increase parliamentary committee sittings, the question of staff complement to effectively carry out the requisite tasks, particularly as it relates to the work of Hansard writers and committee clerks, has been highlighted as a crucial part of the discussion.
Those personnel who spoke with The Sunday Gleaner asked that their names be withheld for fear of victimisation.
Inadequate staffing, according to one person, is contributing to serious burnout on the job. The plight of Hansard writers has been overlooked for years by respective administrations, one staff member highlighted.
Hansard is the official verbatim records of Parliament.
At present, there are seven Hansard writers, with three of that number being retirees who have been retained on contract. The Sunday Gleaner has been informed that, ideally, the full complement of Hansard writers should be 12.
CONSTANT BACKLOG
One writer revealed that the workload of Parliament, including the sittings of both the Lower and Upper houses, as well as a litany of sessional committees, has become onerous for the skeleton staff.
The writer said they have devoted not only long work hours on the job but gruelling overtime at home on a regular basis to try and keep pace with the lengthy presentations covered in both the parliamentary and committee sittings. They admitted that the workload was overwhelming for the understaffed group, noting that a constant backlog remained, despite their most efficient and best efforts at completing the task.
Further, the stenographic skills honed by these writers are not readily available on the job market, as The Sunday Gleaner has been informed that the institute that once trained stenographers had ceased to provide the training for years now, leaving a huge void in that skill set locally.
Members of the Hansard team take turns at writing the verbatim notes but the process can be arduous as it sometimes extends for hours, depending on the schedule of committee meetings and the sittings of the House and Senate.
With no additional incentive for going the extra mile, a frustrated member of staff described the salary as woefully inadequate.
Questions have also been raised as to why Hansard writers are denied travelling benefits while their counterparts in other sections of the public sector reportedly receive the payment.
Leader of Government Business Edmund Bartlett told The Sunday Gleaner that in his new capacity, he has been having dialogue with the administrative leadership of Parliament with a view to finding a technological solution that would enable parliamentarians to have access to instantaneous recording and recovery of information.
“We recognise that there has been this deficiency in terms of the capacity of the House to deliver the demand for immediate and almost simultaneous reproduction of debates and other types of information that come from the Chamber,” he said.
Bartlett said he is now in the process of combing through several studies aimed at enhancing the ability of Parliament to deliver at a higher level of output for the benefit of Jamaicans and to strengthen democracy.
He said that a special Standing Orders Committee would be established to “begin the process of the modernisation of the Parliament”. The newly appointed leader of government business said one of the key mandates of that committee is to build the institutional capacity of the Parliament to help members of parliament carry out their roles more effectively as lawmakers.
‘A LOT OF WORK’
On the question of reviving a training institute for stenographers, Bartlett said he could not give a commitment for its re-establishment but gave the assurance that “we are working through a process that will enable us to build a cadre of support for the Parliament which will allow for immediate translation and reproduction of debates of the members in the House”.
The committee clerks who are, among other things, tasked with the responsibility of preparing minutes and oftentimes voluminous reports from committee deliberations, are also stretched to cover a plethora of committees.
There were four committee clerks covering about 10 sessional select committees along with several other joint select committees and special select committees in the last parliamentary year.
Member of parliament for St Andrew South and chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Mark Golding, observed that not only are the Hansard writers facing an uphill task in terms of inadequate personnel but the committee clerks are also “understaffed”.
“It’s quite difficult to find adequate committee clerks who play a very vital role in the functioning of a committee. They are the ones who produce the minutes, for example, and they coordinate all of the public-sector agencies to come to the meetings when they are supposed to come,” said Golding.
“You have situations where there are not sufficient committee clerks and some who are overwhelmed because they have to be doubling up and doing multiple committee work.”
Having to produce detailed minutes from the PAC fortnightly and at times weekly minutes for the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee, Golding insisted, “It’s a lot of work”.