Education ministry, Colleges of Education teachers head for NLC
The Ministry of Education and the Colleges of Education Teachers Association of Ghana (CETAG) head to the Labour Commission to solve grievances of the teachers over their migration to the Single Spine Salary Structure (SSSS) today.
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The teachers have since Monday, January 20, 2014, embarked on a strike.
Invitation by Labour Commission
Wednesday’s meeting will be the second time in less than two weeks when the two have been invited to appear before the commission.
Last week, January 15, 2014, the two bodies were to have appeared before the commission, but only the ministry responded to the invitation and consequently the commission ruled in favour of the ministry, the Public Relations officer of the ministry, Mr Paul Kofi Krampah, told the Daily Graphic.
CETAG challenges Commission
But CETAG is questioning when the commission issued the summon or invitation and who in CETAG received it, “because we never received any summon or invitation from the commission.”
“Why should CETAG fail to honour an invitation that we cause the commission to issue?” the President of CETAG, Mr Nti Asamoah queried in an interview and wondered if it were a ploy to portray the leadership in a bad light.
“... we will be at the commission and we will want the Commission to prove to us and indeed, the public when we were invited and we failed to turn up,” he said.
Mr Asamoah, who teaches at the Wesley College, Kumasi, said the publicity about CETAG failing to appear before the commission was creating disaffection among members towards their leadership because “they feel we are being irresponsible”.
He said as far as CETAG was concerned, there was nothing illegal in its action and stated that at the meeting CETAG would seek to find out what was considered as illegal in the strike, “because we met all the necessary conditions to embark on a strike”.
Legality of strike
Touching on the strike, Mr Asamoah said it was never a pleasant thing since their students would be writing the end-of-semester next week and explained that they had been pushed to the wall.
Giving a background, Mr Asamoah said ever since the colleges were upgraded to tertiary status, conditions of service of the teachers had remained the same in spite of several pleas to the ministry.
He said CETAG request for a 70 per cent of the gross salaries to members as an interim measure was turned down by the ministry, claiming that such an issue was outside its mandate and, therefore, referred CETAG’s to the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC).
Mr Asamoah said even though CETAG did not challenge that, it had expected the ministry to “lead us to the FWSC; after all, we are their employees.”
Letter from ministry
But a letter dated January 6, 2014, signed by the sector Minister, Professor Naana Jane Opoku- Agyemang, and addressed to the President of CETAG indicated that a copy of the documentation on harmonised conditions of service for colleges of education had been forwarded to the FWSC for advice.
The letter said the ministry was liaising with the FWSC to facilitate the process, advising, “in our collective efforts to ensure a smooth transition of the colleges of education, we must be circumspect in our actions or inaction not to derail the progress of work but to allow the structures to work.”
However, Mr Asamoah insisted that even if CETAG would want to go to the FWSC, it would have difficulties of making any progress since the ministry was yet to make available the statues of colleges of education, a document it could present to the FWSC.
Writer’s email: [email protected]
