What It Would Take

Eleven articles ago we set out to answer a question a client had asked and we could not answer: what does the public sector pay for this skill, in this jurisdiction? This article is an account of what we found, what we got wrong, what we still cannot do, and precisely what it would take to finish.

What eleven articles established

None of the figures in this series existed in comparable form before we assembled them. That is not a claim about the quality of the work; it is a statement about the state of the field. Every number came from a document a Caribbean government had already published, and the entire contribution has been to read those documents carefully and put them on a common basis.

Exhibit 1. The eleven findings, each traceable to a named published source.

Several of these have surprised people who work in this field. The one that has travelled furthest is the first: that Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, with no shared pay policy and no common adviser, have built salary bands that are identical to five decimal places. It is the kind of finding that only appears when somebody measures two things that nobody had previously thought to measure together.

The one we think matters most is less quotable. It is that the widest divergence anywhere in the region is at the FLOOR rather than the apex — sevenfold between the Cayman Islands and Jamaica, against roughly threefold at the top. Public pay debate is conducted almost entirely at the apex, which is the end where the jurisdictions differ least and the money involved is smallest.

What surprised us most

Three things, none of which we expected when the work began.

The first is how much DESIGN there is in Caribbean public pay. We had half-expected to find structures that had accumulated rather than been built — the residue of decades of settlements, each reasonable, none coordinated. There is some of that. But there is also a great deal of deliberate architecture: identical band geometry arrived at independently, allowances designed to scale with pay, disciplined services grades pinned to core ladder points, a top nursing grade set at a round figure and built around.

The second is how consistently the reasoning has been lost. The designs are there; the explanations mostly are not. Almost nothing we found records why a band has thirteen points rather than nine, why an allowance is flat rather than proportional, or why the apex has a scale in one jurisdiction and a single figure in another. Those were decisions, and they were taken by people who understood the trade-offs. The decisions survive; the trade-offs do not.

The third is how much is published and how little is used. Sixteen governments lay documents before their parliaments describing what they pay. The material is public, largely free, and almost entirely unread outside the departments that produce it.

What we got wrong

A series that has spent twelve articles asking governments to be precise should be candid about its own errors. There were five worth recording, and each was published in the article where it was discovered rather than quietly fixed.

Exhibit 2. Five corrections made during the research.

The fourth is the one that most nearly went wrong. Our first extraction of the Barbados establishment schedule appeared to show the number of established posts falling by 14.1 per cent in a single year. That would have been the most newsworthy figure in the entire series, and it was false — 460 rows had failed to yield a second-year figure to our parser, accounting for the whole of the apparent reduction.

THE DISCIPLINE THAT CAUGHT IT

Nothing clever. Simply a rule that a finding which would make a headline gets tested against the extraction before it is tested against the world. The larger and more striking a result, the more likely it is to be an artefact of the method — and the more tempting it is to skip that step because the result is exciting.

Where the five pilot jurisdictions stand

Exhibit 3. Which of the five can currently be scored, and why the other two cannot.

Barbados can be scored now: its establishment schedule allowed us to map 22 of 23 benchmark roles. Jamaica and the Cayman Islands have complete published salary structures but no post-to-grade mapping, so they can be scored as soon as that mapping is obtained.

Guyana cannot be scored, because the only classification instrument available to us dates from 1973 and its grade architecture has since been replaced. Trinidad and Tobago cannot be scored, because its general service pay has not been settled for two periods reaching back more than a decade.

Both of those are findings rather than failures, and both appear in the publication as such.

What remains

Exhibit 4. The eleven jurisdictions not yet collected.

Eight CARICOM member states and three comparator jurisdictions remain: Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Suriname; and Bermuda, the Turks and Caicos Islands and the British Virgin Islands.

We have deliberately not begun collecting them. The five-jurisdiction pilot existed to discover what would go wrong while it was still cheap to discover it, and it worked — it overturned our central assumption about sources and forced eleven corrections to the method. Beginning the remaining eleven before those lessons were absorbed would have meant collecting most of them twice.

Two that will need particular care

Suriname requires Dutch-language capability and, more importantly, terminology mapping rather than translation. Its public service operates under a rechtspositie framework whose categories do not map neatly onto the Westminster vocabulary the rest of the region shares. We will budget for a specialist reviewer rather than a translator.

The comparator jurisdictions — Bermuda, the Turks and Caicos Islands and the British Virgin Islands — are not CARICOM members and will be reported separately and never ranked alongside CARICOM states. They are in the study because they set the ceiling Caribbean employers compete against for professional talent, and omitting them would leave the most important comparison out of a publication about pay.

What the series taught us about method

Beyond the findings, the work produced a set of practical lessons that would save anyone attempting similar research a great deal of time. We set them out because the most transferable output of this project is not the numbers but the technique.

Lesson	What it means in practice
Establish the document type before assuming its contents	Object-based and establishment-based Estimates look identical from the contents page and yield entirely different things. Check which you have before building a method around it.
Harvest vacancy circulars continuously	They are the bridge between a post and its salary range in every jurisdiction tested, they are ephemeral, and they are almost never archived. Collect them before you need them.
Render every unextractable document	A PDF returning no text may be a scan or outlined type. Three of five jurisdictions had a critical document in that condition.
Check the vintage of the architecture, not the money	An old scale can be uprated. A superseded grade structure cannot, however complete the document looks. Guyana’s 1973 plan is the cautionary case.
Verify remit before citing authority	Trinidad and Tobago’s Salaries Review Commission is authoritative and covers about 950 people. Authority and coverage are different properties.
Archive at your own address	Government sites reorganise without redirects. A live link is not a record, and the link will be dead when a figure is challenged.

The second of those changed how we resource this work. We had treated circular harvesting as a fallback for when better sources failed. It is not a fallback; it is the primary technique, and it should be a standing activity rather than a response to a gap.

What Edition One will be

We designed this research to produce a ranked register of what named roles pay across sixteen jurisdictions. The evidence does not support that, and we are not going to publish it as though it did.

Exhibit 5. The first edition, as the evidence currently supports it.

Edition One will be a structural study: how Caribbean public services are built, how much reward sits outside basic pay, and precisely where the region cannot currently be compared. It will carry a benchmark-role comparison for Barbados and Jamaica only, labelled indicative on the page rather than in an annex, with the basis difference stated where the reader will see it.

WHAT IT DELIBERATELY WILL NOT DO

It will not rank jurisdictions. It will not reduce any public service to a composite score. It will not publish a sixteen-country role register, because the evidence for one does not exist. And it will not omit Guyana or Trinidad and Tobago — both appear, unscored, with the reason stated. An absence explained is information; an absence unexplained is a gap.

The full methodology will be published as an annex, including every correction listed above. Anyone who wishes to check our arithmetic, dispute our conventions or repeat the work should be able to do so without asking us for anything.

What we are asking for

Exhibit 6. The six documents that would allow any jurisdiction to be included in full.

The second of those — a post-to-grade mapping — is the single most commonly missing item across the whole study, and the one that would unlock the most. Jamaica publishes complete salary scales and no mapping. The Cayman Islands publishes a complete scale and grades by evaluation points rather than title. In both cases the structure is fully public and the question “what does an accountant earn” cannot be answered from it.

The fourth — employer pension and health contribution rates — is the least consistently published element of Caribbean public reward anywhere, and on the Cayman evidence it is the element that moves total reward most. We have audited figures for one jurisdiction out of sixteen.

A specific note to public service ministries

We are not asking anyone to publish anything that is not already public. In almost every case the information exists, has been laid before a parliament or issued by circular, and is simply difficult to locate or unusable in the form it takes.

If your jurisdiction appears in this series as lacking something, the likeliest explanation is that we did not find it. We would genuinely rather be corrected than be right about an absence. Every correction received will be acknowledged in the publication and the institution supplying it credited.

What a completed register would answer

It is worth being concrete about what the missing eleven jurisdictions would make possible, because the value is easy to state abstractly and easy to underestimate.

For an employer

A single question, answerable in a minute: what does the public service in this jurisdiction pay for the role I am trying to fill, on a total reward basis, and how does that compare with the two neighbouring markets I also recruit from? At present that question takes weeks and produces an answer with caveats attached to every figure.

For an investor establishing under the Treaty

The cost of hiring the same skill in each CARICOM member state, on a common basis, alongside the position on free movement of skilled nationals. Those two questions are always asked together and have never been answerable together.

For a government

A regional reference point. Every pay reform in the region is currently argued without one, which means the affordability debate and the fairness debate are conducted with no external anchor at all. A jurisdiction considering whether its compression ratio, its floor or its allowance structure is unusual has nowhere to look.

For the region

Something more basic. The Revised Treaty commits CARICOM member states to the free movement of skilled nationals. Movement of labour requires people to be able to compare what they would earn. That comparison is currently not possible on any systematic basis, for any profession, anywhere in the Community.

THE GAP IN ONE SENTENCE

A regional integration arrangement built on the movement of skilled people has no regional record of what skilled people are paid.

Why this is worth doing

A reasonable person might ask why a professional services firm has spent six months assembling data that no client commissioned.

The immediate answer is commercial and we have stated it throughout. Public service pay sets the floor that private employers in this region compete against, and our clients could not see it. That is a real problem with a real cost, and solving it is within our practice’s competence.

The larger answer is that the absence of this data has consequences beyond any one firm’s clients. An investor deciding where to establish under the Revised Treaty cannot compare the cost of hiring a qualified accountant across CARICOM member states. A government considering pay reform has no regional reference point. A union negotiating a settlement and a finance ministry resisting it are arguing without shared facts. And a citizen asking whether their public service is well or badly paid relative to its neighbours cannot be answered.

Sixteen jurisdictions publish this information, by constitutional requirement in most cases. Nobody had put it together. That is a strange thing to be true of a region with a shared administrative inheritance, a common language across most of it, and a treaty commitment to the free movement of skilled nationals.

What it would cost

For anyone weighing whether to help, the honest scale of the remaining task is worth stating.

Collecting a jurisdiction is not a research project. Where the six documents in Exhibit 6 exist and can be obtained, extracting and verifying a jurisdiction takes days rather than weeks — the Barbados establishment schedule, 414 pages and 2,399 rows, was parsed and checked in an afternoon. What takes months is finding the documents.

That asymmetry is the whole argument for asking publicly rather than writing sixteen letters. A single reply from a personnel department attaching a scale and a post listing does more than weeks of searching, and costs the sender almost nothing because the documents already exist.

Closing

This series has published eleven findings and five of its own errors. It has declined to score two jurisdictions, declined to rank any, and declined to publish a comparison the evidence would not carry. We think the restraint is the reason to trust the rest of it.

The work is not finished and will not be finished by us alone. Eleven jurisdictions are uncollected, four documents are outstanding in the five we have, and one significant methodological question — how to value employer health provision across the region — rests on audited figures from a single territory.

What began as a client question turned into something we did not anticipate: an account of how an entire region prices the work of its own governments, assembled from documents that were public all along. The most useful thing we can say at the end of it is that the material was never hidden. It was simply never read together.

If you hold any part of what is missing, we would like to hear from you.

WHAT THE PUBLIC SERVICE PAYS™

Twelve articles, published fortnightly through 2026, drawn from research across sixteen Caribbean jurisdictions. Every figure traceable to a named published document. Edition One of the underlying study, Caribbean Public Sector Pay: Structure, Reward and the Limits of Comparison, follows. Public service ministries, personnel departments, statistical offices and central banks wishing to supply information, or to correct anything published in this series, are invited to contact the firm. Corrections will be acknowledged and reflected, and the institution supplying them credited.

SOURCES

This article summarises findings published across articles one to eleven of this series; the sources for each are stated in the article concerned. Principal documents: Government of Jamaica salary scales for monthly and weekly paid staff 2022-2025, the job-family schedules, the Summary of Public Sector Salary Scales and the Estimates of Expenditure 2026/2027; Barbados Schedules of Personal Emoluments 2026-2027 and Public Service Circular No. 44/2023; Cayman Islands Government Salary Scale effective 1 January 2025 and the Office of the Auditor General’s report on civil service remuneration, November 2023; Republic of Trinidad and Tobago Budget Statement 2026, the 120th Report of the Salaries Review Commission and Personnel Department Circular Memorandum No. 2 of 2026; Public Service of Guyana Classification and Revised Salaries and Wages Plan and the Estimates of the Public Sector 2026; and minimum wage instruments and announcements for Jamaica, Barbados and the Cayman Islands. All derived figures are Dawgen Global calculations. No individual officer’s name or salary has been recorded or reported at any point in this research.

This article is the twelfth and last in What the Public Service Pays™, a Dawgen Global series drawn from research across sixteen Caribbean jurisdictions. Dawgen Global is an independent, integrated multidisciplinary professional services firm serving the Caribbean. This research sits within the firm’s HR Advisory practice, which advises on job evaluation, grading reviews, pay structure design and reward benchmarking across the region. Enquiries: [email protected] | dawgen.global

About Dawgen Global

Dawgen Global is an independent, integrated multidisciplinary professional services firm headquartered at 47 Trinidad Terrace, New Kingston, Jamaica, serving more than 15 territories across the Caribbean. Founded and led by Dr. Dawkins Brown, Executive Chairman, the firm is independent and not affiliated with any international network. It delivers a full suite of professional services under one roof: audit and assurance; tax advisory; IT and digital transformation; risk management; cybersecurity; actuarial and insurance regulatory advisory; HR advisory; mergers and acquisitions; corporate recovery; business advisory and strategy; accounting BPO and virtual CFO services; and legal process outsourcing.

The proposition is simple: big-firm capability without the big-firm price. Dawgen Global’s integrated approach is built for the specific complexities and opportunities of the Caribbean market, helping organizations make sharper, better-informed decisions that drive measurable progress.

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