Iraq's public-sector employees get a salary boost

The Baghdad University architecture professor regards his 75% salary increase as a fitting reward for having stayed in Iraq while so many other people of means fled. The extra dinars in his paycheck, Bassem said, are proof of a tentative step forward from the darkness and violence.

They mean that years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, "the government is beginning to take root and establish itself," he said. A nationwide increase in public-sector salaries took effect at the end of June for civil servants, from rookies to department heads at public hospitals. The lowest-paid civil servants, who earned $100 a month, now receive at least an extra $16 or so.

The new scale includes extra pay for seniority and dependents, and especially for education level. Those who hold a bachelor's degree get a 50% increase in salary, those with master's get 75% more, and the salaries of those with doctorates have doubled.

All told, the government will spend an additional $1.8 billion annually on salaries for its employees, all of it from oil revenues, said Ala Abdullah, a member of the parliament's finance committee. The pay increases are among the first major benefits from post-invasion oil profits, though it comes years later than the Bush administration expected.

Months of diminished violence have allowed Iraq's battered oil industry to return to its prewar production level of 2.5 million barrels a day. (Before Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the international sanctions that followed, the country was producing almost 4.5 million barrels a day.)

The resurgent production combined with record oil prices adds up to a massive windfall, part of which is being passed on to civil servants.

"This will create more confidence in the government," Abdullah said. "It's an indication of stability."

It's also a plea aimed at the thousands of Iraqi professionals who fled the country. The message: Things are getting better. Come home.

"This is one of the reasons [for the salary increase] -- to lure some of them back," Abdullah said.

Five years of insurgency and lawlessness after the ouster of Saddam Hussein took a heavy toll on Iraq's most educated. University professors and doctors were targeted for assassination by insurgents and for kidnapping by ransom-seeking gangs.