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Jagdeo supported teachers’ strike in 2018 for better wages, but in 2024 he sings a different tune while in office
Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo
By Shervin Belgrave
Kaieteur News – As opposition leader in 2018, Vice-President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo supported a nationwide teachers’ strike for better salaries while he was Leader of the Opposition but in 2024 while in government is singing a different tune.
Over the last five days there has been an intense strike/protests by teachers across the country demanding better salaries but the Peoples Progressive Party Civic (PPP/C) led government is refusing to meet and bargain with them on a possible salary increase.
At Jagdeo’s weekly press conference on Thursday he was asked multiple times whether his government will at some point engage the Guyana Teachers Union (GTU) to negotiate increase in salaries and better working conditions.
Instead of answering the questions, the Vice President dodged them.
One reporter asked, “What is wrong with collectively bargaining with the union and salaries, let them submit proposals, you look at them”.
Jagdeo in response said that the GTU is not a “credible” organisation to meet with.
“Frankly speaking, now that I have had chance to go through in great detail where the state of the union, you know sometimes we are busy and you don’t look, I accused the media of doing that, but we too didn’t pay enough attention, with this state of affairs this is not credible body anymore,” Jagdeo said.
The Vice President claimed too that the government has already met 60 percent of GTU’s demand as it relates to better working conditions for teachers.
“Not everything has to be about wages, it could be about training of teachers, scholarships for teachers, it should be about housing for teachers. The 100 billion we spend on house lots, teachers will benefit from that, the
roads we build for communities, teachers will also benefit from that…”, Jagdeo posited.
Jagdeo also made it clear that he does not support the ongoing protest/strike led by GTU because it is a political one.
This is the same Jagdeo who in 2018 as opposition leader supported a nationwide strike by teachers.
At a PPP/C press conference on September 6, 2018, Jagdeo said “…We have a crisis with our teachers and our children, crisis because this government [the then APNU+AFC government] has refused to negotiate in good faith with the teachers.”
He then added, “Crisis because they [the previous government] have been callously mis-representing the teachers and rather than sit down and renegotiate with them they have been engaged in a confrontational approach to resolving this issue.”
At that time teachers were similarly, in a deadlock with the Ministry of Education, for salary increases and Jagdeo as Opposition Leader threw his full support behind them and accused the then government of finding monies to double ministers’ salaries and not the wages of teachers.
“So let me just say that we support teachers and their industrial actions because of the way they are treated and the whole country should,” Jagdeo said in 2018 before adding, “And so we support this strike, this is not a political strike although they [the APNU+AFC Administration] try to make it like that”.
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