Teachers Reject 15% Pay Rise

The chairman of the group (m) reading the press statement

THE STRIKE action embarked on by the Coalition of Concerned Teachers (CCT) across the country continues unabated, as the aggrieved teachers have rejected the 15 percent rise in their salary announced by the government last Friday.

In an attempt to lure the striking teachers back to the classroom, the Mills administration, after a crunch meeting with the leadership of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) and National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT), declared a 15 percent pay rise for teachers as retention premium.

The teachers have been on strike for over a week now, as they keep on registering their displeasure over the discrepancies in their migration onto the new pay policy, the Single Spine Salary Structure (SSSS).

A fresh graduate teacher takes less than GH¢400 as salary, as against his counterpart in the Police Service who joins the security organisation as chief inspector on a salary of GH¢1,400, and upon promotion to ASP after two years in the service, goes home with GH¢1,700.

Whereas some of the teachers had a meager rise in their salary, others unfortunately had their salaries slashed, contrary to President Mills' promise that teachers would be smiling to the bank after they have been migrated onto the new pay policy.

At a press conference in Kumasi yesterday, the embittered teachers flatly rejected the 15 percent retention premium offered them, contending that it was not enough to assuage the sufferings of teachers.

The press conference, which was held at the GNAT Hall in Kumasi and dubbed 'Better Conditions Of Service For Teachers Now Or Never', was attended by public teachers at both the primary, Junior High School (JHS) and Senior High School levels from across the country.

They tasked the government to review teachers' salary in totality to ensure that the basic salary of teachers received a major boost to better their lives, rather than the introduction of retention premium which they noted was a cosmetic approach.

The teachers charged the government to come up with a roadmap that would see to the accelerated development of teachers and also accept the payment of allowances, which is 10 percent of their basic salary.

Some of the allowances the disillusioned teachers are demanding include rent, research, transportation, marking, supervision among others.

Noting that they would continue to stay away from the classroom and agitate for better conditions of service for teachers, the infuriated teachers emphatically stated that no amount of political intimidation and victimization could deter them.

'We want to emphatically state that some of us are better in academics and other social life than the politicians we have in this country, therefore we would not allow ourselves to be intimidated by any politician but would continue to fight for our rights,' the chairman of the group noted.

They announced that they had lost confidence in the leadership of GNAT and NAGRAT and therefore declared that they resolved to give the leaders 72 hours to vacate their positions and hand over all assets of the two bodies to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) until such a time that the constitution of both GNAT and NAGRAT were reviewed and competent leaders put in place to man the affairs of teachers.

Though the disappointed teachers noted that they would not the take the law into their own hands to cause any sort of mayhem, they said they would resort to every legal means to oust the executives of the two bodies, should they refuse to comply with the ultimatum given.

According to them, their leadership had amply demonstrated that they did not have the welfare of their members at heart, hence their inability to negotiate for a better deal during their consultation with the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC), the body implementing the new pay policy.

The teachers indicated that they were shocked when the Finance Minister, Dr Kwabena Duffour sought to imply in an interview on television that because of the supposedly huge number of teachers, any salary increase would disturb the economy.

'The remark by no mean a person than the Finance Minister is a clear indication that education is not a priority of the Mills government,' the teachers observed, stressing that they had come to believe that the government had a grand agenda to further impoverish teachers.

From Morgan Owusu, Kumasi