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Mr Kofi Asamoah, Secretary General of Ghana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) on Friday urged politicians to be circumspect in their utterances and actions during Election 2012. �Like any other election year, we expect the political temperature to rise. However, let me remind the politicians that Ghana is bigger than their ambitions and political parties." Mr Asamoah was speaking at the 2011 Ghana Trades Union Congress/ Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) end-of- year interaction in Accra. The forum attended by journalists from the private and State owned media is an annual event organised by the GTUC for the two institutions to reflect on their activities during the year and the future. Mr Asamoah said though the GTUC would remain non-partisan, it had the right to educate its members to make the right choice for Ghana. He said the GTUC was calling on President John Evans Atta Mills to set up an independent enquiry to investigate the furore over the payment of GHc58 million to Mr Alfred Agbesi Woyome to the credit of Vamed Engineering Company. Mr Asamoah noted that the conflicting narratives from different sides of the political divide did not help the public to have a dispassionate account of the facts. He said in the interest of transparency and openness the sittings of such a committee of enquiry should be held in public to ensure public confidence in the outcome of the its work. Mr Asamoah said despite the implementation of the Single Spine Salary Structure (SSSS), which represented an important intervention by government to address the multiplicity of challenges in the public service reward system, many public sector workers were still deeply dissatisfied with their pay and conditions of service even after they had been migrated onto SSSS. He said the GTUC had emphasised the point that the Single Spine Pay Policy (SSPP) should be able to address the low pay in the public sector otherwise all what had been achieved so far could come to waste. �As we enter a new year, which is also an election year, we would like to appeal to government to take the bull by the horn in terms of upward adjustment of salaries,� he said. Mr Asamoah explained that the base pay and pay point relativity on the SSSS should be adjusted in such a manner that the SSSS could offer meaningful salaries to all public service workers. He said the GTUC was convinced that productivity in Ghana would improve if workers were adequately compensated. Mr Asamoah pointed out that the GTUC did not believe that exhortations, admonitions, and appeals alone could bring out the best in a worker whose pay was insufficient for food, utility bills, school fees for his or her children, rent, transport and quality health care. �It is for this reason that we are appealing to our social partners generally and government especially to revive the consultations towards a national living wage. Ghana is now a middle-income country and so salaries and our living standards must reflect that status,� he added.