The Guyana Teachers’ Union strike which began on February 5th this year lasted for a month. In terms of its duration and the numbers who came out in support it could perhaps be regarded as the most successful walkout since the public servants took industrial action in 1999. The government had been very cavalier prior to the strike, and clearly did not believe it represented much of a threat to classroom instruction. They were to be rudely surprised. The teachers came out, if not quite en masse, certainly in very substantial numbers, even in places like Region Two which the ruling party has always regarded as one of its constituency areas.
The government has gone to some pains since it acceded to office to label the GTU a political entity, and the strike when it came, therefore, as politically inspired as well as illegal. Yet the teachers themselves all over the country made clear that it was not about politics but about the traditional issue of wages and salaries and the fact that the government would not meet the union to discuss these. No matter where this newspaper went interviewing random teachers of every ethnicity, the reason given for their action was always the same – insufficient money and the failure to have wage talks, with the same complaint being registered on their placards.
But the PPP refused to acknowledge this, suggesting the teachers were being manipulated by the opposition. Unfortunately the party has a history of not adjusting easily to realities where these do not accord with its theory of a situation, and so it was on this occasion. Had the GTU not taken the government to court about the Minis-try of Education’s announcement it would be stopping salaries for striking teachers and would not be deducting dues for the union, Justice Sandil Kissoon would not have been able to intervene and order mediation talks between the parties. Had he not done so the strike would have continued no doubt, with the government clinging to the unsustainable claim that it was, as it said in a press release, unlawful, racist, and divisive.
If everyone breathed a sigh of relief after the two sides sat down to talk, it proved to be premature. The problem came over a disagreement about whether it was salaries for the period 2019-2023 which were to be discussed, or a multi-year agreement starting from 2024. After two sessions on March 7th at which Chief Education Officer Saddam Hussain was the lead negotiator for the Ministry of Education, the GTU said that it had been agreed that discussions would concern 2019-2023 salary increases. Mr Hussain has since disputed this. At the next meeting, however, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry Shannielle Hoosein-Outar replaced Mr Hussain as chief negotiator and insisted on the 2024 position, following which the talks collapsed.
When the GTU case was originally brought the Attorney General had asked for a grace period to respond, which had been granted, and in the interim Justice Kissoon had ruled that the status quo be maintained. What has happened since then is that Justice Kissoon has now issued a ruling that the strike was both legal and justified and so deductions cannot be made from the salaries of striking teachers.
He criticized the government for failing to engage in meaningful discussions on salaries over a period of three years, despite efforts by the union to hold negotiations, and gave no quarter either to Chief Education Officer Hussain or Chief Labour Officer Dhaneshwar Deonarine. The testimony of the first was not credible, he said, while the second was derelict in not taking steps to bring the strike to an end. The ruling also described government’s actions against the GTU as discriminatory, since it had targeted the union’s financial resources and had attempted to undermine its authority. The Judge made reference too to President Irfaan Ali’s meeting with some teachers at State House which did not constitute collective bargaining with a recognised union. In a poetic flourish Justice Kissoon was quoted as saying: “Teachers lifted their voices and they asked for bread; they were given stones.”
This is the kind of court decision which would warm the hearts of any union executive, and not surprisingly the GTU leaders expressed themselves as very happy. The government was less so, and wasted no time in letting it be known it was appealing the decision. How long that will take before it is heard is not clear, but it should not stop the GTU and the government exploring possibilities for coming to an accommodation on the matter of salaries.
General Secretary Coretta McDonald sounded emollient afterwards saying that the union would re-engage the Ministry of Education to discuss the way forward. She said they would remind them they were still open to negotiations, and depending on their response they would decide the next step. Given that the Ministry was not prepared to revert to salaries discussions for the period 2019-2023, she said, “We will have to reconsider if we are going to incorporate the 2019-2023 proposals into 2024 or maybe do a fresh proposal for a new multi-year agreement.” She was reported as going on to say that once the government and the union could arrive at a consensus and put forward viable solutions to address the needs of teachers there would be no need for further industrial action.
In the wake of the court ruling GTU President Mark Lyte also said that the union would wait for a response from the Ministry of Education before making further moves, although he did not suggest a union initiative first. He said that options which had been decided at the General Council following the collapse of the talks after PS Hoosein-Outar took over as chief negotiator were still valid, and involved arbitration, a return to industrial action or legal action. If the last route were followed, he said, it would be against the Ministry of Labour. Before the executive decided on the next steps, however, the union members across Guyana would need to be heard.
He was not impressed by the government’s decision to appeal Justice Kissoon’s ruling, which he called “retrogressive and barbaric.” That is unnecessarily strong language, since the union could have expected that the decision would be appealed. Apart from anything else, the government, as the AG said, does not want to set a precedent.
Nothing much else has been heard from either side in the last two weeks as to how they intend to proceed; President Lyte’s comments on May Day had reference to all workers and not just teachers. Yet parents, teachers and the community at large want some settlement of the issue. Ms McDonald’s suggestion of some innovative proposal in relation to 2019-2023 salaries is worth working on, but it would presuppose that the GTU had approached the Ministry, and critically, it in turn was open to discussions. Could not unofficial contacts first be explored to see if an agreed agenda for more formal negotiations could be created?
If Mr Lyte for his part is waiting for the Ministry to contact the union in any official way, he is likely to have a long wait; the court ruling will have done nothing for their self-esteem. That aside compromise is alien to this government and it may be calculating that it can sit tight, because it is unlikely to face industrial action this late in the school year, and the mid-year break will soon be upon us. This would be short-term thinking, but then long-term thinking was never this administration’s strong point. We don’t want a strike at the beginning of the new school year either. There is of course the possibility that the Chief Labour Officer will act out of character and do something he should have done long ago.
What one doesn’t want is confrontational talk from either side; that will only make a solution harder to find. As for the government, in an environment where education is touted as critical to the country’s development, then it will need to attract and retain competent teachers. As a starting point they should be paid a living wage and the administration should waste no more time in working out how it is going to provide that. Once it has decided in principle to allocate the funds, then the mechanism by which agreement is made with the GTU, whether through the Labour Ministry or Education or whatever, ceases to be much of an issue.
