Dear Editor,
We have all heard the narrative over and over: justice workers have been wronged, and Government needs to pay them what they are owed. We have heard it so many times, most people have accepted this as being necessary. But what if we told you that narrative is wrong, or at least, it is not the whole truth, not by far.
It takes a lot of time talking to people and digging through old documents on several on-line libraries to reconstruct the actual history behind some present-day problems like this one. However, we feel that what we have uncovered needs to get out. Then you decide what is true! Who are we? We are a collective of people on St. Maarten and in the diaspora researching historic facts and backgrounds of some of today’s political problems. We realize our revelations may stir up some response. Knowing the politicized society, we live in, especially in election time, we must withhold our actual names and will use the pen-name: “Stoker”.
Like many things in our young country, the story started at its birth on 10-10-10. However, its roots are much older. For many years the Netherlands Antilles had a so-called Windward Islands Allowance for its workers that were stationed, you guessed it, on the Windward Islands. The reason was simple, the considerable higher cost of living over here. This allowance was introduced in 1972 and was set at 12%. In 1974 it was increased to 16.3% and since that time no research was done anymore to establish the actual difference in the cost of living between Curaçao and St. Maarten. We guess it was getting too expensive. The allowance stays at 16.3% until this very day.
The Island Territory of St. Maarten had established its own salary system in 1969 but hadn’t updated its salary scales regularly. So, over the years they copied the salary scales from Netherlands Antilles and added their 16.3% allowance for its own civil service in St. Maarten.
The only real problem with this system of adding allowances to a salary is the pension. Mind you, the 16.3% is real money and you must pay income tax, AOV, etc. on it as well. However, you don’t pay pension premium (to APS) on it, and so, it doesn’t count in your (APS) pension. It wasn’t until 2008 when the Island Territory of St. Maarten finally updated its own civil service salary policy and included this 16.3% in the salary, which made it count also for the APS-pension. Of course, you also had to pay 25% pension premium on it, of which 8% came out of the civil servants pay. Since this would result in a negative effect on the net salary of civil servants, Government granted an extra salary increment to compensate for that.
As of 10-10-10 the civil servants of the Netherlands Antilles that were stationed on St. Maarten became civil servants of the newly formed Country St. Maarten. The Social Charter regulated that they were to be enrolled in the St. Maarten salary system the same way the previous civil servants of the Island Territory of St. Maarten were in January 2008. Exceptions were made for those entities that had their own legal position regulated by law, such as the Police Department and the Coast Guard on their insistence. This incorporation in the St. Maarten system was done for all other so-called Justice workers. Yes, it was done for Customs, the prison, the Financial Intelligence Unit, and the part of Immigration that was not incorporated in the Police Department. It was also suggested to do so for the police, then and again in 2014.
So why were the police not included? They refused! Their unions, yes, the very same unions now advocating the opposite, were against this. Their main argument was that they wanted to keep the possibility for police people of the Leeward Islands to come and (temporarily) work here where they then would get that allowance. So, it was they themselves that wanted to stay with their old Netherlands Antilles salary system including their Windward Island Allowance. In their mind they were (and maybe still are) more closely related to the Police Department in Curaçao than to the rest of the civil service of St. Maarten. Our first Minister of Justice, Duncan, didn’t push this issue through against the will of those scary Curaçao-based unions. The NAPB for instance, still has its seat located in Willemstad, Curaçao, instead of Philipsburg, St. Maarten.
In short, the problem of the salary scales didn’t concern all Justice workers, just the Police and National Detectives. The latter group was, until 10-10-10, an integral part of the police force KPNA. Since everybody got what they wanted, the real question is, why did it become an issue in the first place? Slowly but surely more people in the police force started to realize this stance was not in their best interest (mainly the pension). And then, … politics got involved.
In the last days of the Leona Marlin Government, then-Minister of Finance Geerlings briefly also became Minister of Justice. He figured that if he promised to “fix” the salary scales and do it retroactively to 10-10-10, this would result in a nice pay-out to many of the police officers. This in turn would benefit him in the then upcoming elections of January 2020. However, he didn’t benefit, he was outmaneuvered by Minister Doran who succeeded him in November 2019 as Minister of Justice. Doran promised the police officers to pay an advance on the projected back-pay and, wait for it, paid it on the morning of election day 2020! Thus, taking the practice of vote-buying to a new level and became the biggest vote-getter. It worked.
Stay tuned for part 2!
Stoker
