New Working Hours for Government and the Public Service
You may have noticed the various announcements from government departments of a change in their opening hours. Well, that shift came into effect June fourteenth when, along with the recent implementation of a ten percent salary reduction, as well as a three-year increment freeze, government decided to shorten the work week by five hours. Today the official circular came out from C.E.O. Rolando Zetina of the Ministry of Public Service. That memorandum reads, “as part of government’s undertaking with the unions on reducing the working hours for public officers, it has become necessary to standardize the scheduling of such reduced hours for the provision of service to the populace. The Cabinet has therefore agreed and declares that the official opening hours of government business will be between the hours of nine a.m. and five p.m. from Monday to Thursday and nine a.m. to four-thirty p.m. on Fridays of each working week.”