…following three aborted meetings
After three aborted meetings with the University of Guyana (UG) negotiation team, two of the institution’s unions are hopeful that solid discussions on wages, salaries and working conditions of all UG staff will commence on November 1.
The University of Guyana Senior Staff Association (UGSSA) and the University of Guyana Workers Union (UGWU) are expected to meet with the team at the beginning of the new month to tackle the issues they say have become frustrating.
Vice President of the UGSSA, Dr. Melissa Ifill, had announced in a press release that a meeting was scheduled for October 23. However, when contacted yesterday, President of the UGWU, Bruce Haynes, informed Stabroek News that due to the absence of council members, talks were delayed.
This had been the cause of the aborting of the two previous scheduled meetings as well.
“The missing element was the council members,” Haynes said when contacted via telephone yesterday. He explained that in addition to this, the unions are yet to complete some preliminary work but have so far submitted to the Administration a document outlining their demands. “This was submitted in May for study and it was to be perused and certain action was to be taken,” he said.
According to Haynes, information for the meeting was available to some extent but will be better prepared by November 1. “We are dealing with finances so right now we have to look at what we are going to finance and how we are going to finance it,” he said, adding that the unions will have this information by the next meeting.
Asked why it had not been prepared in time for the initial meeting, Haynes said “we had it to some extent on the last occasion but it was not communicated to the council”. He stated that Terms of Reference were also prepared by the unions and it was handed over to the bursar for the negotiating team. “We will now have a clearer perspective when we meet again,” he told this newspaper.
Ifill, in her earlier press release, had said that in relation to the negotiation meeting the unions noted that two meetings had been previously scheduled with the UG negotiation team in June following the submission of the unions’ Memo of Demands in May. However, council members failed to attend on both occasions and the meetings had to be aborted, the release said before stating that UG lecturer Dr Patsy Francis revealed that “in response to our stated intention to resume industrial action in light of these breaches, a meeting with the university negotiating team was hastily arranged to forestall the resumption of industrial action by staff.”
Following discussions, union members present at a meeting on October 18 agreed that notwithstanding the dissatisfaction with the overall state of the university, “the unions would not call for an immediate resumption of industrial action once the initial negotiation meeting proceeds satisfactorily.”
The unions called on the administration to fulfill all the terms of the Resumption of Duties Agreement.
“We call on the administration to come clean and publicly admit the devastating financial crisis faced by the UG.
We call on all political and civic stakeholders to conduct an urgent national inquiry into the state of the university and engage with university staff to ensure that the university is transformed into a viable institution that facilitates the development of Guyanese youths and our nation Guyana,” the release had said.
