The Guyana gov­ern­ment has hint­ed at the pos­si­bil­i­ty of pro­vid­ing on­line learn­ing for stu­dents af­fect­ed by an in­def­i­nite na­tion­wide strike by teach­ers, in­sist­ing al­so that it would not bow to de­mands by their union for salary in­creas­es.

Last year, the Ir­faan Ali gov­ern­ment, which has deemed the cur­rent in­dus­tri­al ac­tion as be­ing il­le­gal, ig­nored re­peat­ed calls for col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing and in­stead en­gaged a cross-sec­tion of teach­ers to hear their griev­ances and re­quests.

Se­nior Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dr Ash­ni Singh in a state­ment last De­cem­ber an­nounced an across-the-board salary in­crease of 6.5 per cent that will ben­e­fit over 54,000 pub­lic ser­vants, teach­ers, mem­bers of the dis­ci­plined ser­vices and gov­ern­ment pen­sion­ers and will place an ad­di­tion­al GUY$7.5 bil­lion(One Guyana dol­lar=US$0.004 cents) in dis­pos­able in­come an­nu­al­ly in the hands of these em­ploy­ees.

The Guyana Teach­ers Union (GTU) is propos­ing a 25 per cent salary in­crease for 2019, and 20 per cent for 2019 to 2023 and an ad­di­tion­al per­for­mance-based in­cen­tive of two per cent an­nu­al­ly.

Fur­ther, the union wants a GUY$5,000 emo­tion­al/ stress/risk al­lowance; a month­ly In­ter­net al­lowance of GUY$10,000; a GUY$10,000 month­ly al­lowance to teach­ers who use their own ve­hi­cles to per­form of­fi­cial du­ties, and a fixed month­ly al­lowance of GUY$7,000 for head­teach­ers/prin­ci­pals to con­duct busi­ness on be­half of their in­sti­tu­tions.

But speak­ing at a news con­fer­ence on Thurs­day, Vice Pres­i­dent Bhar­rat Jagdeo said if the gov­ern­ment agreed with the GTU’s salary in­creas­es, that would mean that a grad­u­ate teacher would earn GUY$500,000 or an un­qual­i­fied teacher’s salary would be about GUY$200,000.

He sug­gest­ed that would cre­ate a huge dis­par­i­ty in salaries for teach­ers, po­lice, sug­ar work­ers and pri­vate and pub­lic sec­tor work­ers who have five Caribbean Ex­am­i­na­tions Coun­cil (CXC) sub­jects.

“This is to­tal­ly un­rea­son­able. We’ve made that clear,” he said, adding that he was “not rul­ing out any­thing” re­gard­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of gov­ern­ment re­turn­ing to the bar­gain­ing ta­ble.

“I’m just telling you what the facts are,” he said, adding that the gov­ern­ment re­mained com­mit­ted to ad­dress­ing the teach­ers’ con­cerns but that would de­pend on the rec­ti­fi­ca­tion of bad faith.

“Un­til some lev­el of cred­i­bil­i­ty is re-es­tab­lished and we know that we’re act­ing on­ly pure­ly on con­cern for the teach­ers, it’s hard to en­gage.”

The GTU, which has strong­ly re­buffed the gov­ern­ment’s re­peat­ed claims that the strike is po­lit­i­cal­ly mo­ti­vat­ed by the op­po­si­tion A Part­ner­ship for Na­tion­al Uni­ty+Al­liance For Change (AP­NU+AFC), said it had tak­en the mat­ter to court.

In a fixed date ap­pli­ca­tion, filed on Tues­day, At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anil Nand­lall was named as the re­spon­dent as the GTU seeks to quash the gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to dis­con­tin­ue the de­duc­tion of union dues from teach­ers’ salaries month­ly and a de­c­la­ra­tion that the strike is le­gal.

The GTU is al­so con­test­ing, among oth­er things, the gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to deduct monies from the salaries of strik­ing teach­ers for the days they were ab­sent from the class­room.

De­scrib­ing the teach­ers’ salary in­creas­es so far as “mod­est” due to the 61 per cent in­crease in the ed­u­ca­tion sec­tor from 2020 to 2023, Bhar­rat said GTU was de­mand­ing in­creas­es dat­ing back to 2019 that had not been con­sid­ered by the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Jagdeo said while his rul­ing Peo­ple’s Pro­gres­sive Par­ty Civic (PP­PC) ad­min­is­tra­tion had pro­vid­ed more re­sources and com­mit­ment to the ed­u­ca­tion sec­tor, the gov­ern­ment could not af­ford more pay in­creas­es.

“It can­not all go in­to wages and salaries. You are not deal­ing with the is­sue of qual­i­fi­ca­tion,” he said, not­ing “We were dis­cussing all is­sues that they wrote on.”.

Jagdeo said as a re­sult of the GTU for­mal­ly in­form­ing the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion on Wednes­day that the strike would con­tin­ue in­def­i­nite­ly, the gov­ern­ment is con­sid­er­ing al­ter­na­tive ways of teach­ing stu­dents.

“If this is pro­longed, we may have to ex­plore on­line meth­ods,” he said, not­ing that most coun­tries were forg­ing ahead with a mix of on­line and face-to-face class­es that al­lows for a few spe­cial­ists to de­liv­er ed­u­ca­tion through in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy.

He al­so said the gov­ern­ment has to find ways of re­open­ing schools.

GEORGE­TOWN, Guyana, Feb 16, CMC – 

CMC/gt/ir/2024