There will be no money in the new budget (2010-2011) to finance the cost of living adjustments for teachers and public servants, according to Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Dean Barrow.
President of the Belize National Teachers Union (BNTU) Jaime Panti told Amandala Monday that the situation is urgent, because the cost of living has risen 30% since the last salary adjustment three years ago.
“It is absolutely impossible that the government will be able to make any kind of salary adjustment for the upcoming year,” said Prime Minister Barrow, in an interview with Amandala this evening.
The government has just completed deliberations for the new budget, and this year’s deficit will be worse than last year’s, said Barrow.
“We don’t have the money. Punto final!” Barrow told Amandala.
The unions representing teachers, nurses, police and other public servants, have been at odds with the Government of Belize over frozen talks to reach a new collective bargaining agreement, the old one having expired in 2006, to increase salaries and benefits in line with cost of living pressures.
President of the Public Service Union (PSU), Jacqueline Willoughby-Sanchez, told Amandala that the unions will hit the morning talk shows this week for two reasons: (1) so that Belizeans can understand the painstaking efforts they have made to maintain dialogue with the government and (2) so that people can understand that “we are at our wit’s end.”
The BNTU, the PSU and the Association of Public Service Senior Managers (APSSM)—which together represent over 10,000 workers—were meeting jointly with the Government of Belize back in 2008, but things reached an impasse when the dollars and cents of the proposal were to be fleshed out. The core negotiations have not even gotten off the ground.
The unions claim that they have done all they could; the government says the unions have failed to provide clear financial estimates. An ultimatum from the BNTU for a meeting to be called by Wednesday, February 10, has to date not been met.
Barrow said that he does not like the demand that Panti had made to the government last week.
David Leacock, Chief Executive Officer in the Ministry of Education, told Amandala that the unions’ proposal had been analyzed in 2009, and the Government negotiating team, chaired by Charles Gibson, CEO of the Public Service Ministry, is due to meet tomorrow, Tuesday, February 9, to discuss the way forward. They will respond to the union shortly, said Leacock.
Minister of Education, Hon. Patrick Faber, told local media last week that the recession has caused a financial crunch, and the government will have to consider the financial implications of the proposed salary adjustment for teachers and public servants.
President of the PSU, Willoughby-Sanchez, told our newspaper that the unions feel “disrespected” by the way government has been dealing with the negotiations.
When the PSU had a meeting with Prime Minister Barrow on December 4, 2009, said Sanchez, they raised the issue of “the disrespectful nature” in which they felt they were being treated. Barrow said, “Don’t worry. I am going to deal with it,” she added.
“To date, a meeting has not been set,” Sanchez lamented.
She said, however, that she is still hoping the parties will exhaust all levels of dialogue before pursing industrial action.
Prime Minister Barrow said that he supports the position of the government’s negotiating team, and he does not want the unions to think that because government cannot afford the salary increases this year, that they should not come to the negotiating table.
Panti told our newspaper that the union wants to see the negotiations wrapped up in time to have their salary adjustments included in the new budget, to take effect April 1. He fears that if there is further delay, it could be another year before teachers get their salary adjustments to coincide with cost of living increases.
Panti made it clear that the ultimatum, giving the government one week as of Wednesday, February 3, to respond, is a BNTU position, and not a joint position with the other two unions, though the three unions have been concerned. (Amandala’s efforts to reach Joy Ysaguirre, who heads the Association of Public Service Senior Managers, have proven futile.)
The main changes the parties are requesting in the new collective bargaining agreement surround salaries and benefits; however, none of the parties we spoke with gave details on the numbers, because they said they have an agreement that they would not make those numbers public until the two sides reach a firm decision.
Bumpy road to the table
Talks began in September 2008, when the parties agreed that the unions have 90 days to submit a joint proposal. That was submitted in December 2008; however, the Ministry requested further changes, and a revised proposal was tabled in August 2009. Since then, talks have frozen.
Sanchez told Amandala that after their December 2008 submission, government was supposed to respond within 90 days. The deadline was February 22, 2009; but government did not respond until February 24, in a letter sent via post from one Belmopan address to another. The letter, reaching the PSU’s office on March 13th and claiming that the unions did not provide adequate costing information, requested 45 more days to review their proposal.
According to Panti, the unions had provided the bulk of the costing information, including salaries, hardship allowances, and pensions; as well as a call from secondary school teachers for government to take on 100% of salary payments, as opposed to the 70%, because they are consequently only getting 70% of their pension under the current scheme.
Sanchez said that the only costing information they could not provide was for open vote workers; and that is because they had written government for a complete list of open vote workers, which government had failed to provide.
Notwithstanding the incomplete costing, the unions say, it is past time for government officials to meet with them at the table to discuss the further rules of engagement, because the new budget year is approaching and time is running out on them.
Even though the revised proposal was hand delivered to the secretary of the Ministry of Public Service and signed for on August 24th, the document was not delivered across the hall to the CEO, Charles Gibson, until a month later, when the PSU was meeting with the official over some grievance cases.
The documents, said Sanchez, were also hand-delivered by the PSU to the Ministry of Education, the Office of the Prime Minister, the Ministry of the Public Service and the Ministry of Labor.
Leacock said that they had received the document in 2009, and reviewed the proposals from the unions, but the government has concerns over the costing the unions have presented, as it is not clear to them how some of the numbers were reached.
In a press release issued Thursday, however, the Government claimed that the proposal of the unions lack the financial information they had requested. It claimed that the government had been doing costing, but the process is “very time-consuming.”
Leacock said that while the costing is a major issue, another is that the system of granting benefits, particularly for teachers, has to be “rationalized,” to determine how they will apply in reality.
Corporal Punishment
Apart from its differences with the government over the new collective bargaining agreement, the BNTU is still in conflict with the government over pending reforms to the Education Act. A key bone of contention is a move to eliminate corporal punishment in primary schools.
Panti said that while the BNTU supports the move in principle, they want to know that an effective alternative strategy would be in place.
“What do you put in place?” he questioned, expressing concerns over the collapse of discipline in primary schools.
While Minister Faber has told local media that it has been 10 years since the proposal to remove corporal punishment had been initiated, he said that the union, which has been resisting government’s plans to do away with it in six months, has yet to recommend an alternative strategy.
For Panti, however, the onus is on the government, and not the union, to put a system in place.
Minister Faber has indicated that while there are those teachers who argue for the retention of corporal punishment, it is not being done according to the set guidelines, which, as BNTU says, require proper documentation of each instance of corporal punishment carried out by the principal or a senior teacher designated by the principal.
Panti challenges Faber on this point, saying that it is the Ministry of Education that is responsible for monitoring the use of corporal punishment in schools.
Panti questioned: “If nobody inspects the schools, how will things function?”
According to Leacock, a project for “Positive Discipline,” which focuses on what students are doing right as opposed to what they are doing wrong, continues to be piloted; however, he said, a task force has been proposed to formulate a replacement strategy for corporal punishment. This was one of the issues that were to be addressed at the recent meeting of the Joint Education Staff Relations Council, he added.
The time, however, was taken up with one major issue: amalgamation, Leacock informed.
Amalgamation of primary schools
In line with an ongoing movement to reform the education system, Cabinet last week endorsed a policy paper from the Ministry of Education for the amalgamation of primary schools. (There are roughly 280 today.)
Leacock said that the proviso is that the ministry would proceed “with as much consultation as possible.” One of the areas where the government intends to begin is the Belize River Valley area. The idea is to apply the concept in other parts of the country.
Panti told Amandala that the union supports the idea for amalgamation because they need to maximize the resources in the education system, but there is disagreement over how the amalgamated schools should be run, whether by denominations or the government, because both tend to be territorial.
Shocking statistics
Panti expressed continued concerns that many primary school classes are just too big for one teacher to handle. He pointed to the very high student to teacher ratio, which in extreme cases is as high as 45 to 1.
Panti told Amandala that within primary schools, only 43% of teachers are deemed to be trained. The figure is even worse for secondary schools: only 34% of high school teachers are considered trained for the job. Even at the university level, he said, there are complaints of teachers (training other teachers) who don’t have the requisite master’s degree qualification.
He is also concerned over the very low transfer rate from primary to high schools. Just about half of primary school students actually move on to high school, Panti reported.