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Teachers and their Union need to be firm with the Coalition Administration
DEAR EDITOR,
This letter provides the corrected version of a table on teachers’ salaries published in Guyana Times on August 27, 2018.
With America and the United Kingdom having vested interests in Guyana for strategic geopolitical reasons and as a former colony respectively, these countries, particularly the United Kingdom, must be shaking their heads at what continues to obtain in Guyana in our political and economic affairs.
Not only they, but Guyanese can very probably attest for themselves that granting Guyana independence in 1966 was premature, because while there was no doubt a need to curtail the extraction of our wealth while a colony, as a means of promoting development locally, releasing Guyana as an independent nation has, in retrospect, been disastrous.
After 52 years of economic mismanagement and retrograde politics, many Guyanese workers and their families survive on depressed incomes while our government ministers, with the approval of the president himself, made themselves right by granting themselves multimillion-dollar annual salaries, deliberately ignoring public servants on the lower salary scales.
The people whose votes brought the administration into power are being treated like fools. I was made to understand that the Police Force did not receive an increase in their salaries in one of the more recent years. It is my considered opinion that underpaying workers is equivalent to robbing them.
The last three years of the PNC-led coalition administration has been a display of utter ignominy, having learnt nothing from its previous misadventure in the political economy of Burnhamism. It is impossible for an economy to prosper, or a government to survive, by casting aside the private sector and marginalizing close to 50% of the population. These I think were thoughts of Dr. Cheddi Jagan on Burnha
mism. This aside, I wish to address the concerns of our teachers and public servants in general.
The current administration has adopted measures, which clearly demonstrate that it intends to de-emphasize workers and their rights both in respect to working conditions and compensation. I reiterate that public servants and workers in general have to make their welfare a priority of this government, and for that matter, any government.
In respect of salaries for teachers and public servants in general, I have already demonstrated that G$146,000 leaves workers with just over G$12,000 per week to look after food, their dependents and other miscellaneous needs, clearly inadequate to those familiar with our cost of living. This is not even considering the impending impact of the recent increase in bus fares.
I have consistently maintained that the salaries of all public servants should be adjusted by an amount, which brings the salary of the lowest paid worker up to an acceptable ‘living wage’. While there has been no agreement as yet on this figure, the adjoining table places the current demands of the teachers’ union in context, excluding miscellaneous items. These I suggested should be dealt with subsequently, since I think that ensuring that all workers receive at least an acceptable living wage is more important. The annual increases have been applied to the base figures alone, since this method produces reasonable numbers.
Examination of these figures, the base numbers of which are estimates, reveals that the total of $900 million put up by government is nowhere close what teachers are asking for. They are encouraged to stand firm with their union, since it is clear the administration has little intention of paying them their just salaries. They should avoid being ‘bought’ by any little bits of money the government pays out as a means of breaking their strike.
Yours faithfully,
Craig Sylvester
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