MONROVIA – The plenary of the Liberian Senate Thursday mandated its committee on Ways, Means and Finance to meet with aggrieved Senate staffers to work at modalities in settling arrears owed them.
Senate staffers had given their bosses a three-day ultimatum and threatened to stage a “peaceful protest” if circumstances surrounding their Liberian dollars component of their salaries were not addressed.
They had alleged not receiving their Liberian dollars component of their salaries since July 2020.
Appeared alarmed by concerns raised, the leadership of the Senate Thursday convened a meeting with aggrieved Senate staffers in a bid to address their concerns.
Charles Brown, head of the Senate Interim Staffers’ leadership, commended the Senate for “taking the bullets” for them. He admitted that they were misled about information surrounding their salaries.
“I would like to appreciate the leadership of the Senate for its timely intervention,” Brown said.
Continuing, he added: “We are glad today to have met the Senate leadership. We want to appreciate the Senate for its intervention. As per our ultimatum and we want to commend them for adhering to our request. While in the meeting we realized that the Senate took a cut in their benefits in the tone of US$ 5,000 that should have been apportioned to our salaries as per the harmonization.”
“They took the bullet for us and today in our meeting these things were explained and we got to know that there is increment in our salary so we are waiting on the Finance department of the Senate to come out with the metric to explain the percentage on how much an individual would get,” he added.
Monsterrado County Senator Saah Joseph Monsterrado County and Chairman on Executive, who represented the Senate at the meeting, expressed joy that both the Human Resource Department and the Finance department of the Senate have met with aggrieved Senate staff to explain to them issues surrounding their salaries.
Saah Joseph said: “We are happy that both the Finance session and the Human Resource Department gave detailed explanations regarding the Liberian dollars component of our staffers’ salaries.”
“We actually provided additional money to our staffs’ based due to the cut they received.”
“We will continue to advocate with plenary to increase the salary of our staff because they go through a lot and we want to assure all employees of government that their dignity will be protected, which is part of government agenda.”