Unpaid University of Guyana employees are to commence strike action if they are not paid salaries owed to them by Monday.
The Personnel Officer of the University of Guyana (UG) on Thursday informed in a brief circular addressed to “All Staff Members” that “due to unforeseen circumstances salaries would not be available today. It is expected that payment would be made some time next week”.
Chair of the University of Guyana Senior Staff Association (UGSSA) Patsy Francis yesterday said that the way in which the news was broken was most inconsiderate and disrespectful. She said UG’s staff, who are usually paid on the third Thursday of the month, received the notice that they would not be paid on the very day they were due to be paid.
She said the move was unacceptable, and “if they don’t pay us by Monday we are going to call the troops out.” It is likely that final examinations, which are scheduled to continue next week, will be interrupted by the industrial action.
Francis said Vice Chancellor Dr Jacob Opadeyi, along with the university’s other administrators, must have been aware of the situation prior to sending the notice, and suggested that action should have been taken sooner. She said the issue was foreseeable and developing and maintained that there is no excuse for allowing it to progress this far. UG officials were unavailable for comment yesterday.
She said that when UG administrators realised payments could not be made this month they should have called the staff and informed them. This, she said, would have been more respectable than the option chosen. She also expressed disapproval that very little explanation as to why their salaries could not be paid was offered.
Francis said she blames the VC and other administrators for the poor way in which the issue has been handled and also because “they are the ones running the place.”
However, she also laid the blame for the university’s “chronic precarious financial situation” squarely in the lap of the Government of Guyana, through its UG council representatives. She mentioned that UG’s longstanding financial woes seem to be getting worse, since this is the first time staff have not been paid on time.
Despite previous hiccups, the university has never been more than a few hours late in making payments to employees. Francis said the VC, who is now in his third month of office, must put forward at least a “short-term economic recovery programme.”
Noting suggestions for the increase in fees as part of such a programme, she said the raising of fees alone will not curtail this longstanding issue. Also, as it relates to engaging the private sector, she said, very little progress has been seen.
Francis expressed the staff’s “extreme unhappiness” at the non-payment of their salaries and said that they intend to commence strike action from Monday if they are not paid.
She said this time the UGSSA and the University of Guyana Workers Union (UGWU) will be taking their protest off-campus to other relevant bodies. She said that they will also be calling on other unions associated with the Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) and the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Guyana (FITUG) to lend their support.
“Our cause is just,” argued Francis.
