A Forced Marriage

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Posted on May 01 2019 0 minutes read
A Forced Marriage
One of many legislative aberrations in our country has been to couple the salaries of private sector teachers with those of the public sector. Thus, under the pretext that at one time their Union did not have enough influence to negotiate the sector’s demands, the government at the time decided to hitch their fate to the caravan of the public sector. Meanwhile, the great advantage of having their salaries raised regularly along with those of civil servants was dangled before private-sector teachers.

However, over the years, the number of civil servants has almost quadrupled. It thus became practically impossible to revise their remuneration without further widening the public deficit and increasing public debt, with all that comes with it in terms of threatening the stability of the national currency. The latest salary scale for civil service, arduously pushed through Parliament last year, has had serious repercussions on the government budget because of the huge gap between appropriations and the amount that must actually be disbursed, hugely inflating the government’s wage bill. Added to this is the recruitment of thousands of additional public servants, uncontrolled as much as it is illegal, as a result of corruption and political clout.

What has become of the teachers’ rightful demand? The part that concerns them in the new salary grid is so vague that it ended up creating an inextricable muddle of the relationship between the private school administrations, employees and parent committees, with the looming specter of rising tuition fees.

The urgency today for private teachers is to regain their union’s autonomy by quickly extricating themselves from this forced marriage with the public sector, to try as much as possible to recover their rights, away from government mismanagement and cobbled-up approach.

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