Fair and Decent Remuneration Rights

The issue of remuneration for state servants ultimately always comes down to one word: partisanship. It is not merely about how much budget is disbursed, but to whom the state chooses to side with first, and on what principles that choice is made. A fair remuneration policy should depart from coherent distributive justice, not justice that only visits a select few groups while others are left as spectators on the stage of their own welfare.

John Rawls, through the difference principle, asserts that socio-economic inequality can only be justified insofar as it provides the greatest benefit to the least advantaged groups. The state’s attitude of allowing the welfare of educators, particularly lecturers, to remain hostage to frozen regulations for nearly two decades clearly contradicts that principle. However, a sharper argument can be made that the problem is not merely one of distributional inequality, but a defect in how the state defines justice itself—justice that stops at form without ever arriving at substance.

At this point, the facts must be laid out honestly. The government, through Presidential Regulation Number 19 of 2025, has provided performance allowances for civil servant lecturers. However, the policy only reaches 31,066 civil servant lecturers within the clustering of state universities as work units, state universities with public service agency status that have not yet implemented remuneration, and the Higher Education Service Institutes—and even then only the difference if the performance allowance exceeds the professional allowance. This fact is often used as an alibi for justification, as if the welfare problem of lecturers has been resolved. The reality is far from it. Lecturers at public service agency state universities that have implemented remuneration and at legal entity state universities, including several prominent campuses, are entirely excluded on the grounds that they ‘have already received income through the remuneration scheme’. This administrative excuse is almost never tested because the remuneration amounts at many public service agency and legal entity state university campuses have never been published transparently, are far from adequate, and at several campuses are no better than the fate of lecturers receiving performance allowances.

Therein lies the more fundamental defect: when the state makes administrative institutional status—merely a matter of budget nomenclature—a legitimate reason to exclude citizens from welfare protection that should apply equally. This is not only a policy anomaly but also a constitutional issue. Article 28D paragraph (1) of the 1945 Constitution guarantees the right to fair and equal treatment before the law, while the non-discrimination principle in the Civil Service Law should guide the formulation of personnel policy regardless of the institutional cluster in which one serves. When differences in administrative status are used to produce differences in the protection of fundamental rights, the state is in fact practising what Ronald Dworkin called a failure to provide ‘equal concern and respect’—equal treatment that is not rhetorical pleasantry but an absolute requirement for the legitimacy of state power over its citizens.

Some public service agency and legal entity state university campuses still struggle to support their own operational costs, so the argument of financial independence that forms the basis for exclusion is in reality a policy fiction that does not fully operate as imagined by the rule-makers. This is what deserves to be called procedural justice without substantive justice: formally the state appears progressive because it has issued a regulation, but substantively the regulation only reaches a small minority, while the majority remain left behind the statistical curtain largely unknown to the public. True justice must not stop at partial resolution, especially if that partial resolution is then used as a rhetorical shield to claim the problem has been solved.

GOVERNMENT HOMEWORK

First, the government and the House of Representatives need to immediately revise the provisions on functional allowances for lecturers without waiting for the final decision of the Constitutional Court. Leaving the welfare fate of academics to a lengthy litigation process is a form of governance failure, not an achievement worth boasting about. Second, the government needs to build a framework for automatic inflation-indexed allowance adjustments for all state apparatus, including educators, so that welfare no longer depends on political mercy and viral public opinion pressure.

Third, the government must mandate public disclosure of remuneration amounts across all public service agency and legal entity state universities, because an exclusion built on closed data is an exclusion that cannot be accounted for. Fourth, a comprehensive evaluation is needed of the remuneration schemes for all strategic state professions within one coherent distributive justice framework, not patchwork policies born of momentary pressure or institutional lobbying proximity.

Higher education is not merely an ordinary public service sector; it is the womb from which other noble professions are born. Placing lecturers at the end of the welfare queue while demanding they produce an excellent generation is a contradiction that this nation will ultimately bear itself. It is time for the government to stop asking ‘is there budget available’ and start asking whether this policy is truly fair, or merely appears fair.

This critique is not demanding that the state overturn the entire budget overnight, for rushed justice is as fragile as delayed justice. What is being asked is far simpler: a regulatory framework that no longer allows the fate of one profession to be determined by how loudly it voices its concerns or how long it can endure in patience. True remuneration justice is not measured by how large the nominal amount given is, but by how consistently the principles used to give it are applied.