Responding to a recent claim by the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) that eligible teachers have been waiting for years to receive agreed duty-free concessions, Education Minister Priya Manickchand has said a miscommunication is to blame and both the ministry and the union share responsibility for the situation.
Despite claiming that her ministry’s relationship with the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) is “a good one,” Manickchand on Friday lashed out at recent comments made by the union and deemed its approach “extremely unhealthy.”
She expressed surprise at the GTU’s approach after President of the GTU Mark Lyte reportedly raised concerns over the union waiting for years for duty-free concessions at a press conference last week.
Some of the issues raised by the GTU, including the duty-free concessions for teachers and the debunching of salaries, needed to be cleared up, Manickchand said. “I would stop short in saying they were dishonest representations in the media… so I’m going to instead offer clarifications,” she said.
Due to miscommunications, Manickchand said, there had been some teachers who had been eligible for duty-free concessions but did not receive them. She further emphasised that the problem had been created by both the ministry and the union and had not only been the ministry’s fault. “To try to say this is the ministry’s problem is highly misleading,” she maintained.
Manickchand explained that head teachers and deputies of Grade A and B schools, once they have served three years on the job and have five years remaining, are entitled to a duty-free concession.
She further said that there had been about a dozen teachers who were eligible in 2009, according to the rules outlined in a Memorandum of Understanding between the union and the Education Ministry. All of these teachers, Manickchand went on, had gotten their duty-free concessions. She added that all of the applications had been addressed and there was no backlog.
In regard to debunching, Manickchand once again cast the blame away from the ministry. According to her, a joint committee had been set up in 2010 to deal with the issue of salaries debunching. She explained that the committee met and a memo was sent out in May, 2010, with a request for information. After an entire year, only about 10% of the union’s membership had returned information, Manickchand said.
A subsequent reminder was sent out in 2011 to members of the union and by mid-2012 the committee had received about 90% of the forms that had been sent out. A salary structure was later made and in 2013 a copy of the proposal was made and sent out by the committee. The GTU had agreed to the debunching agreement but recently Lyte had shared his dissatisfaction with the agreement, which placed teachers in different salary scales based on their number of years on the job.
According to Lyte, the benefits of the agreement have been minimal.
Manickchand, however, maintained than any issues with the debunching process could not rest solely with the ministry.
“I am saying that both sides should’ve have done something a bit quicker… but this is not us. We’ve been waiting on the union forever to give us this information. So to lay the blame at our doorstep is less than honest,” Manickchand said. She added, “The government sat and entered into a Memorandum of Under-standing with the union because we want to do what is in the best interest of our teachers, as far as our economy would allow. Why would we not then want to do this?”
Manickchand maintained that over the years the Education Ministry and the GTU had shared a good relationship, with an open-door policy coming from the ministry. Their collaborations, she further said, came from a mutual desire to see the enhancement of the union’s members.
Manickchand opined that the union’s approach is an attempt to gain attention or to stay or become relevant. “If they were really concerned about addressing this then they would have raised it with us; we’re not preventing you thereafter or even simultaneously to go meet with the media but it cannot be healthy way of engaging partners,” she emphasised.
“We are in touch by telephone and up to last week there was a meeting… I’m very surprised to see some of the issues that the union has been raising, for the first time, in the media. So there is no engagement with us to address some of these issues,” she emphasised. She went on, “They’re engaging the ministry through the press and I think it’s a very new and worrying form of engagement. I would caution them to rethink that strategy.”
