The Ministry of Education is now offering a 4% increase in teachers’ salaries for 2003 but the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) is rejecting that offer.

The offer has been increased from the 3% which was put on the table in July.

GTU President Sydney Murdock yesterday told Stabroek News that the Ministry of Education made the 4% offer in writing at a meeting held between the union and the GTU on Wednesday. The meeting was facilitated by the Ministry of Labour, Human Services and Social Security. The two parties are due to meet again on September 4.

Murdock said that the union had written the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Ganga Persaud rejecting the offer which he described as being unreasonable.

Murdock also told this newspaper, that based on the union’s assessment, some 170 teachers at middle management level and up, had left the country to take up posts abroad.

Murdock said that the one per cent increase which had been added to the 4% had been obtained from a $15 million offer the ministry made to buttress the salaries of qualified teachers for 2002, and from a sum of $13 million which should have been used to pay Whitley Council leave for 2002. The $13 million was inadequate to pay Whitley Council increases for 2002.

Murdock contends that the $15 million and $13 million were offers made for the year 2002 and the salary issue for that year among other matters had not yet been settled. This, he said, had been communicated to Persaud who has taken over negotiations with the union from former permanent secretary, Hydar Ally.

Teachers took strike action earlier this year over the 2002 salary issue, when children were still preparing for the Secondary Schools Entrance Examinations and the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) and the General Certificate of Education examinations.

Noting that school reopens tomorrow, Murdock said that there was a faction in the union which did not want teachers to return to school, but the executive of the union, he said, was still in discussions with the education ministry and it would be unprincipled to take industrial action while negotiations were still on.

While teachers are expected to return to work for the first week of the new academic year, Murdock said that “beyond the first week I cannot say what will happen.”

He noted, too, that some 170 teachers in senior and middle management position in the public schools will not be in the public schools when school reopens. Based on the union’s assessment, he said that some 170 have already left to take up positions in New York, London and in the Caribbean, and some are due to leave by October 1 for Botswana.

As long as the remuneration of salaries continued to be an issue for teachers, Murdock said that teachers would continue to leave the system. (Miranda La Rose)