JORDAN
Teachers in Jordan have held a sit-in at the Civil Service Bureau (CSB) in the capital, Amman and warned of “escalating measures” if their demands to amend the Public Service Performance Evaluation System are not met.
The Jordan Teachers Association (JTA) said it would organise a partial strike and stage further protests to press for its demands.
It urged changing the performance evaluation system in which each Department or Government institution had to rate 10 per cent of employees as excellent, 40 per cent very good, 40 per cent good, 8 per cent average and 2 per cent weak.
If an employee is rated weak for two successive years, they face the sack.
Spokesperson for the JTA, Ahmad Hajaya said the set distribution led to pre-judging employees and killed the spirit of creativity and honest competition.
He said supervisors rated teachers in order to fit the set distribution and not according to their actual performance.
“Out of the 220,000 employees who work in the public sector, 4,400 are now predetermined to be rated weak, therefore becoming prone to losing their jobs,” Mr Hajaya said.
“Employees are hired in the first place because they are good, so it is not reasonable to dismiss them and leave them jobless.”
President of the CSB, Khalaf Hmeisat said the system sought to enhance the work efficiency in the various Government Departments by setting “objective” criteria, and pointed out that the previous evaluation system resulted in more than 70 per cent of employees being rated excellent.
“This indicates the necessity of a more precise and objective system,” Mr Hmeisat said.
“Although the evaluation rates should be normally distributed, there is still a margin of flexibility where institutions can have more excellent rates or no weak rates at all if the institutions’ outcomes prove that.”
He said that of the 34,000 employees who were hired during the past four years, just nine had been dismissed, and this happened only after they had exhausted all their chances to show improvement.
Amman, 23 April 2018
