The work-to-rule industrial action which the Guyana Teachers Union (GTU) asked the nation’s teachers to participate in from today seems to have not affected the operation of schools.
Long time GTU member Lancelot Baptiste told Stabroek News that teachers across the country have been told about the exercise and are ready to put it into operation should there be any infringement of the provisions of the non-academic norms which govern the conditions under which they work.
However visits to several city schools by Stabroek News found teachers working as per normal.
The staff members who spoke with this newspaper said the effect of a work-to-rule action is difficult to judge since teachers generally comply with the requirements for their job and have not raised any complaints about non-conformity to the non-academic norms. One senior teacher said, “It’s not like a sit-in where you can go around and see who is teaching and who is not, teachers may be supporting the call for work to rule but we don’t know.”
The union identified several schools in the county of Berbice which it claimed had closed due to teachers refusing to work.
This refusal, according to the union, came as a result of non-functioning of washrooms, inadequate washroom facilities and in some cases lack of staffrooms. Stabroek News was able to contact one of the schools and a senior staff member denied that the school had been closed.
When Stabroek News reached out to Minister of Education Priya Manickchand for comment she declined stating that she would address the matter in a press release.
The work to rule was called by the union as a protest against the failure of the present government through the Ministry of Education (MoE) to pay monies owed to teachers as part of a debunching exercise.
Debunching first became part of the GTU-MoE negotiations in 2006. However, it wasn’t until 2011 that agreement between the MoE and GTU was reached to allow “an equivalent of approximately one per cent of the teachers’ wage bill [to] be used to implement the debunching exercise by the end of May, 2011.” This condition has not been met.
After ten years of negotiations and five years of having a concrete agreement in place the union was told on April 22 by Cabinet Secretary Dr Roger Luncheon not only that there was no money to pay for debunching in 2014, but that no money had ever been budgeted for debunching.
Noting that teachers have been extremely patient, GTU President Mark Lyte lamented that they had been “waiting for ten years for teachers to receive long overdue monies only to realise that all these years [they] have been taken round and round and finally to be told that there is no money, that no money has ever been budgeted for the debunching.”
As a result a call went out for industrial action.
Teachers are currently paid on a scale constituted using academic qualifications. This means that a trained teacher with 5 years of experience is paid the same salary as a teacher who has recently graduated from the Cyril Potter College of Education.
A senior mistress with over 10 years’ experience at her post in some cases may be taking home the same money as someone she once taught. A debunching of the salary scale would see teachers being paid different salaries commensurate with their years of experience.
