With Sri Lanka reducing the retirement age of State employees from 65 to 60 years in a move to cut down Government expenditure, nearly 27,000 State employees are set to retire from service, spelling significant upheavals in the offing for the country’s overstaffed public sector.
Part of the country’s austerity drive in its attempt to secure an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout, the Ministry of Public Administration published a gazette on 5 December revising the compulsory retirement age of Government workers to 60 years, effective from 1 January 2023. However, the gazette notes an exception for officers whose age of compulsory retirement is fixed by the Constitution, by any other law, or if decided by a competent authority.
“Besides, it has also been reported that the increase in the retirement age has restricted the promotional opportunities available for many public sector and semi-Governmental employees. Accordingly, it is proposed to reduce the retirement age of public sector and semi-Governmental employees to 60 years,” President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is also the Finance Minister, said while presenting the interim Budget for 2022.
Speaking to The Sunday Morning about the process of reducing what is a bloated State sector, Ministry of Public Administration, Home Affairs, Provincial Councils, and Local Government Secretary Neel Bandara Hapuhinna said nearly 27,000 State employees were expected to retire in line with the gazette.
He further noted that the retirement limit would particularly impact essential services: “While this will become a problem for essential services, other sectors will not be as affected. The most impacted sectors will be those which are already facing problems, such as railways and nursing.”
Hapuhinna explained that pursuant to the Government’s move to tackle the overstaffed State sector, it had no plans to employ any new workers to fill in the vacant positions. However, he noted that should there be a breakdown in service, such as in the railways sector, those who had already retired would be re-employed on a commission basis.
Strain on the Railway Department
Meanwhile, speaking to The Sunday Morning, All Ceylon Railway Employees’ General Union General Secretary S.P. Vithanage said that these retirements of railway employees came at a time when the department was already strained due to existing vacancies.
“Over 9,000 vacancies have existed for a while in the Department of Railways with employees retiring each year. In such a backdrop, after 31 December 2022, over 600 railway employees had to retire in line with the Ministry of Public Administration circular 19/2022 of 14 September 2022.
“All these workers were trained workers. With their retirement, the divisions in the Railways Department in charge of operation and maintenance of trains, carriages, railway tracks, and train signals, as well as railway station administration were strongly affected,” he explained.
Vithanage asserted that the authorities had no proper plan to fill the vacancies created as a result of these retirements and this neglect had ensured that the public moved away from trains as a mode of transport.
“Since September, railway authorities have been aware of the fact that these workers would have to retire. They had over three months to implement a programme in this regard. If they had made preparations to ensure that railway commuters are not inconvenienced, there would not be this many train cancellations and suspension of operations.”
Urgent requirement of teachers
Education, another sector that will see vacancies opening up, also has its trade unions expressing concerns over the 60-year retirement cap.
Ceylon Teachers’ Service Union General Secretary Mahinda Jayasinghe noted that despite a large contingent of around 15,000-20,000 teachers being tipped to retire this year as well as the previous year, the Education Ministry had so far not taken any steps to fill these vacancies.
“Teachers retiring can’t be compared to office workers retiring; if there is work that needs to be done in an office due to a vacancy, someone can be recruited to cover the task. However, teachers work with children and there is no other way of filling these vacancies; if they fall behind in terms of children’s education, there is no way to recover that time. The Government has not formulated any plan to address this issue.”
He noted that they have continuously made requests to the authorities to recruit teachers to fill the shortfall, adding that they strongly criticised the delay on the part of the Government in this regard.
Jayasinghe stressed that this would have a significant impact on the education sector: “It is not that other sectors won’t be impacted, but comparatively, the education sector will be more affected. In other sectors, the vacancies can be covered through other means.”
Moreover, he claimed that gratuities had not been paid in over one and a half years and with the large numbers that would be retiring following the gazette, there would be another issue in providing gratuity to the retirees.
CEBEU says retirement age cap ‘justified for CEB’
In the utilities service sector however, Ceylon Electricity Board Engineers’ Union (CEBEU) President Eng. Nihal Weerarathne said that for an institution such as the Ceylon Electricity Board, the retirement age cap of 60 was justified given the nature of the work involved.
He said that as the CEB was a technical institute that employed engineers, workers needed to be recruited annually to various CEB divisions as these involved highly academic exercises, such as the formulation of generation, transmission, and distribution plans, construction of transmission systems, operation and maintenance of power stations, formulation of tariffs, etc.
“It is only when people retire that those below them can be promoted and new workers can be recruited for the vacancies that are then created. The issue is that previously, recruitment was not limited and retirement age was set at 62, which meant that older workers were not retiring, thus preventing fresh recruitments. However, the present issue is completely different, with workers retiring at 60 but recruitment having been suspended. This has become a massive problem,” he explained.
This situation is particularly problematic given the present economic environment in the country where the youth tend to leave for better opportunities abroad, he noted.
This, in addition to the five years of no-pay leave to go abroad and increased taxes, had seen many employees in the sector leaving, all leading to significant vacancies within the CEB which would impede the continuation of services, he stressed.
Health sector braces for impact
Meanwhile, the health sector is also anticipating a strong impact from the revision. All Ceylon Nurses Union General Secretary S.B. Mediwatte shared that the nursing service was under great strain due to these moves.
He said that for the nursing service, annual recruitment had not been undertaken in a continuous manner for many years. Once the present batch graduates from the nursing schools this January, the next batch will only graduate after two years. No new batches had been recruited since 2019 to nursing schools and there was no programme in place to fill the existing nursing vacancies of over 10,000, he claimed.
According to him, as a result of the economic crisis and the unsolved issues within the nursing service, many workers have left the country, while over 2,000 nurses have left the service within the past 4-5 months. Therefore, the 60-year retirement cap being imposed in this context further complicated matters, he noted.
As he explained, while Grade I and the Special Grade nurses should retire by 60 to ensure that other nurses could receive promotions to these grades, the departure of nursing officials who composed the hospital workforce from Grades II, III, and the Supra Grade was a problem.
This segment of the workforce, since recently, had begun to leave the country and retire in massive numbers, leading to the collapse of operations in certain hospitals such as in the Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa Districts, he shared.
Accordingly, while staff from the nursing administration service should retire by 60, the nursing staff who work closely with patients retiring at 60 was not ideal, as the vacancies created due to this were causing the collapse of patient care services.
Mediwatte further shared that close to 1,000 nursing staff would retire in the coming days due to the gazette.
The Government Medical Officers’ Association (GMOA) noted that the retirement age of doctors being revised to 63 was a necessity as the present economic crisis was causing many doctors to leave the country.
Speaking to The Sunday Morning, GMOA Spokesperson Dr. Vasan Ratnasingam explained that lowering the retirement age for doctors would create significant staff shortages: “We need to retain the doctors to keep the health system functioning. On the one hand, the Government has announced a mandatory retirement age and by about next year around 1,000 doctors will retire. On the other, junior doctors are leaving the country due to the economic situation.”
Given this context, he noted that extending the retirement age of doctors to 63 would provide a transitionary period to address the vacancies caused by the doctors leaving the system. He noted that a shortage of doctors would cause more problems for hospitals in rural areas, as doctors would be transferred to cities and towns in case of shortage.