CEB engineers' salary scale & allowances leak
With CEB engineers threatening the government and a strike along with a blackout, the salary scale of engineers leaked to the public domain. Accordingly, CEB’s 1160 engineers’ total salary is 555 mln rupees with top officials getting nearly 920,000 rupees a month.
With CEB engineers threatening the government and a strike along with a blackout, the salary scale of engineers leaked to the public domain.
The document is mostly accurate apart from,
- The vehicle and fuel allowances are not being paid to the E3 and E4.
- Some Engineers are not entitled to the total allowance mentioned in the allowances column.
Ceylon Electricity Board Engineers' Union (CEBEU) point behind the strike is also a valid one. There are problems with the current bidding system. Yes. But eliminating competitive bidding and replacing it with a system that has no competitiveness leads to more corruption.
Ceylon Electricity Board is for power generation and maintaining the grid. Engineers are an essential part of that process. The real problem with CEB is not the salaries of engineers. The sheer number of lower-level positions created by politicians and filled up with political appointees.
According to the CEB’s 2018 Annual Report, which is the latest of such reports available on the CEB website, CEB had 26,331 employees & a total installed capacity of 4,187 MW as of last year, at the rate of 6.29 employees for each MW of power generated. assuming no new hires.
Meanwhile, CEB’s Malaysian counterpart Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) which generates nearly 6x more power than CEB at 23,896 MW as at 30 November 2021 had 27,423 employees at the rate of 1.15 emp for each MW of power generated. This shows that CEB has nearly 6x more employees.
CEB should be cleaned up there is no argument about that, but playing with Engineers' salaries by leaking it in order to create public outrage, might backfire on the minister.
To be selected as a CEB engineer usually, they need to have a 1st class or 2nd upper for their BSc Engineering degree from Mora/Pera/Ruhunu university. And they have to go through a thorough interview process. To put it simply, they deserve their salary.
Some call for privatization of CEB after this revelation thinking salaries are high, but with privatized CEB salaries might have 3x ed for Engineers.