Dear Editor,
It is a curiousity that the Guyana Teachers’ Union should feel elated about having ‘negotiated’ a 5% annual increase on existing Teachers’ salary scales, when their Public Service counterparts have been involuntarily receiving the same level of increase over the past several years, without representation, or even, in instances, not working to earn it.
It needs no intensive examination to detect the palpable gaps between the (published) values of the Public Service 14 Grade salary structure, and those of the current GTU’s 29 Grade (including 24 scales and 5 fixed salaries). So what in fact has been ‘achieved’ is the perpetuation, for at least another five years, of the substantive inequitabilities between the extant structures, amongst others.
One of the others is the statutory requirement for teachers to improve their educational qualifications in order to be candidates for upward movement in the system; while a significant proportion of their public service counterparts can progress, essentially on the basis of experience, in the absence of a viable performance appraisal system, to which however teachers are subject.
Regarding the discussed ‘bunching’ effect created at the minima of scales when new appointments are made, the same pervasive disability has long been overlooked across the Public Service.
Hopefully therefore, the Education Minister, so pleased with the ‘win’ on his side of the table, in agreeing to examine this chronic issue (and related costs) in the teaching service, may have opened the opportunity for it to be appropriately addressed as a fundamental sore searing across the traditional public service.
He can be a standard bearer. The innumerable dis-affected public servants would be surely grateful for the breakthrough.
Yours faithfully,
E B John
