Tema, Nov. 14, GNA – The Tema District Council of Labour (TDCL) has called on government to reduce taxations on overtime payment to serve as an incentive for workers to happily work for extra hours when needed.
Mr Emmanuel Addo-Kumi, TDCL Vice Chairman in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Tema, said government must announce the reduction in the overtime tax during the 2022 budget.
The Budget is expected to be presented to Parliament by Mr Ken Ofori-Atta, Minister of Finance on November 17, 2021.
Mr Addo-Kumi said; “We are calling on the Finance Ministry to at least reduce the overtime tax in order to motivate workers who do extra hours when the need arise.”
He noted that the tax put on the overtime benefit was too much and therefore served as a disincentive for workers to volunteer to work for extra hours to boost productivity in their organizations.
He added that there was also the need to even separate the overtime earnings from the basic salaries, explaining that the current form was unfair as it left the worker with no benefits even when they worked overtime.
“As leaders in the industrial hub of the nation, we know that a lot of workers do extra hours because of their work schedule.
“But the painful aspect is that at the end of the month both the basic salary and the overtime are put together and huge tax is imposed on the poor worker’s salary, which demotivate the worker to the extent that some workers refused to work after the legal eight hours a day,” he said.
He explained that currently government adds the overtime benefit to the basic salary of the worker, which inflated the gross and pushed the worker into a higher tax net, therefore it led to them paying more tax and being deprived of the actual overtime benefit.
Workers, he said, would therefore be extremely happy if the overtime was set apart from the basic salary and a small percentage between five and ten per cent was imposed on it irrespective of the worker’s basic salary.
He added that leadership of TDCL was also calling on government to as a matter of urgency consider reducing the fuel price increments as it was putting hardship on Ghanaian workers as they spent a larger portion of their salaries on transportation to and from work.
GNA