Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — Cabinet directors have submitted the required “Essential Employees Listing” following a May 6th memo from Gov. Lolo Matalasi Moliga who also requested justification for why these employees are considered “essential” to ASG operations during the current COVID-19 state of emergency.

In the memo, the governor notes that some cabinet members have raised the issue about the employees who have been deemed to be “essential” to ASG operations and cabinet members have been requested several times to provide the list of employees who are “essential to ensure that services to the public are not interrupted or compromised.”

The governor’s memo made it’s way to others in ASG as well as the public sector raising questions as to what an “Essential Employees Listing” is.

Responding to Samoa News follow-up questions, ASG coronavirus task force chairman Iulogologo Joseph Pereira notes the 4th amended emergency declaration extends the 50%/50% employment format for all government agencies and that employees 60-years and older at all ASG agencies and semi-autonomous agencies are to work from home as they are “the vulnerable sector of our population” to the virus.

Employees who because of the nature of their work cannot work from home, are classified as "essential employees", he explained.

“The first responders are automatically referred to as essential employees. The classification is applied to other agencies of ASG,” he said.

For example, payroll processing employees of the Department of Human Resources cannot work from home because their job is to perform the pre-payroll preparatory work to check working hours for the entire government and keying this data into the payroll system.

“If the 50%/50% work format is applied half of these employees will have to work from home but they can't access the system from home so they have to come in or the payroll will be delayed which is going to create havoc within the American Samoa. Government,” he further explained.

“Essential” means the “employee's physical presence in the office is necessary to perform assigned duties and responsibilities because these said duties and responsibilities cannot be performed from home,” he explained, noting that the employees 60-years and older who are required to come to work must do so.

In his memo, the governor gave cabinet members a deadline to submit the list of essential employees “who you can’t do without in order to maintain services to the general public.”

Lolo instructed directors to “provide appropriate justification … germane to the need for critical nature of the service being provided.”

According to the governor, he “cannot devise a plan to address these employees unless I know the number involved.”