Just un­der 2,000 teach­ers will re­ceive their back­pay at the end of the month, af­ter the pay­ment was not made in time for Christ­mas as had been promised.

The as­sur­ance came af­ter the Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) met with ex­ec­u­tive se­nior of­fi­cials from the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry yes­ter­day.

The new date was giv­en af­ter the union made an im­promp­tu vis­it to the min­istry’s head of­fice on St Vin­cent Street, Port-of-Spain, to get an­swers from Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly on out­stand­ing back­pay for some mem­bers.

The na­tion’s teach­ers, along with oth­er pub­lic ser­vants, were promised their back­pay af­ter ac­cept­ing the Gov­ern­ment’s four per cent wage of­fer.

Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert an­nounced the pay­ment dur­ing his 2024 Bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion last year.

“Through phone calls, through writ­ten cor­re­spon­dence and we have not got­ten any sub­stan­tial feed­back,” TTUTA pres­i­dent Mar­tin Lum Kin said.

“When will our re­tirees be paid as well too, when will mem­bers of the third sched­ule be af­ford­ed that as well too?” he asked.

The spon­ta­neous vis­it paid off, as TTUTA of­fi­cials met with the min­istry’s per­ma­nent sec­re­tary Jacque­line Charles and oth­ers.

The union was in­formed that “con­sid­er­able progress” has been made, with 97 per cent or 12,467 teach­ers al­ready re­ceiv­ing their back­pay. The min­istry said this was in­clu­sive of 923 teach­ers who re­ceived their ar­rears out­side of the De­cem­ber 19, 2023 salary and an­oth­er 1,357 teach­ers who will re­ceive back pay with their Jan­u­ary salaries.

Per­ma­nent sec­re­tary Charles al­so told the union that pro­cess­ing of pay­ments to re­tirees will com­mence when pay­ment to ac­tive teach­ers is com­plet­ed.

On Jan­u­ary 4, Gads­by-Dol­ly said the back­pay process was on­go­ing. She said staff worked on it dur­ing the hol­i­day sea­son but the process was not com­plet­ed.

The back­pay cov­ers the 2014 to 2017 and 2017 to 2020 pe­ri­ods.

But Lum Kin ques­tioned the rea­son for the de­lay, not­ing TTUTA pro­vid­ed all the names of teach­ers to the min­istry.

“They are well aware of those per­sons who were not paid but TTUTA as­sist­ed. Lo and be­hold, yes­ter­day, the deputy per­ma­nent sec­re­tary wrote our sec­ond vice pres­i­dent ask­ing for the NIS num­bers of those per­sons af­fect­ed. How dis­re­spect­ful can you be? What mad­ness is tak­ing place? This in­for­ma­tion lies with­in the re­mit of the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, the em­ploy­er,” he said.

Joint Trade Union Move­ment (JTUM) gen­er­al sec­re­tary Ozzi War­wick lent sup­port to TTUTA.

He said it was dis­re­spect­ful how teach­ers were be­ing treat­ed be­cause they work self­less­ly and must be treat­ed with dig­ni­ty.

“Some of these teach­ers teach­ing for 20, 30 years some of them re­tirees. You go in­to the bank on­ly to find out noth­ing for you. That is gross dis­re­spect to a group of work­ers in this coun­try who has con­tributed sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the de­vel­op­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go,” he said.

War­wick said the fact that the union had to show up at the min­istry to get an­swers be­cause of a lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion was a slap in the face.

He said the Gov­ern­ment needs to show more re­spect to one of the biggest stake­hold­ers of the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion.

The trade union­ist said the In­dus­tri­al Court al­ready forced mem­bers to ac­cept what he de­scribed as “crumbs” and to add to that they were not paid on time.