A long awaited salary increase was on Friday afternoon granted to teachers across Guyana following a lengthy meeting between the Guyana Teacher’s Union (GTU) and Education Ministry (MoE).
The teacher’s will now benefit from a 12% increase for the year 2016 and a 8% increase for 2018. This new agreement is expected to be made final by signing during the coming week. According to President of the Union, Mark Lyte, GTU sat as a body in the meeting and agreed to the figure offered by the Ministry.
However, although the Union head has agreed to a specific amount, the General Secretary, Coretta McDonald exclusively told <<Inews>>that she is not pleased with the amount as she personally believes that the teacher’s “deserve more”.
This settlement brings to the end threatened protest action would have seen teachers across the country downing their tools once again.
Strike action was taken on August 27 which lasted for a few days after the Education Ministry had refused to honour a negotiable 40% increase being requested by the Union for teachers across Guyana.
Following a meeting, strike action was called off after the Ministry had agreed to go to arbitration to have the matter settled.However, this too remained at a standstill after both parties could not find common ground on those being proposed to lead the arbitration which saw the President’s intervention.
