Latest update February 17th, 2025 9:42 PM
Jun 06, 2023 Editorial
Kaieteur News – Teachers belong in the classroom, but there they were on the streets. It has to take a considerable amount of anxiety to push them to the action of broadcasting their woes in public. The teachers’ protest in front of the Ministry of Finance on Tuesday last had to do with the usual concerns-pay, past monies due, and commitments not honoured. The core of their concerns is that they are having great difficulty living with dignity. Their placards and words tell their story.
“Everything has increased except teachers’ wages and salaries”. There is a certain solidity to that claim because it has been the cry of other workers in other sectors across Guyana. Guyanese are feeling considerable pain, and it is a crying shame that so many cannot buy the basics when they are dubbed as the richest people on the planet by experts. Another placard had this to say, “we need our salaries to be adjusted” which again joins hands with many Guyanese feeling the unrelenting squeezes from a punishing cost of living environment.
The pain of teachers is real, and not imagined or pretended. When the wages and salaries of Guyanese teachers are compared against those of their peers across the region, they come across as paltry and pathetic. The fact that Guyana now floats on a huge lake of oil only serves to emphasize that the conditions of teachers and other workers across Guyana just should not be where they are. This country has too much going for it currently, and there is the risk that the gaudy economic numbers only enable a few to prosper, while many are left in the ranks of what can only be described as the pauperized in the reality of their hard existence.
It is an insult when a trained teacher, after years of study, is paid a starting monthly salary of $100,000. After all that effort and all that application to what is believed to be more than a career, something that is very much a calling, there is this monthly salary that is so close to the national minimum wage. As Guyanese have been made jarringly familiar by now, $100,000 a month cannot cover the basics of living, with fixed commitments, such as mortgage or rent, and the prices of food and other essentials ever rising.
This is why teachers are forced to do second jobs to make ends meet, to have a little something more to share with their families, and to live with some level of self-respect. Naturally, since they are forced by circumstances to engage in extra wage-earning activity outside the classroom, this begs the question about how much focus and energy they are able to bring to bear to their daytime classroom duties. Clearly, when teachers are compelled to work at nights and on the weekends (one even works as a bouncer at a nightclub), the keenness of their strength and their spirit in their full-time day job in schools come under some degree of duress. It goes without saying that both the educational system and the young charges pay some sort of price due to circumstances involving pay and other benefits.
Moreover, the Teachers’ Union is aware of the presence of oil in Guyana and the difference that it can make. Union President, Mr. Mark Lyte insisted, “We are grossly underpaid, and we would like to see the oil money be spent on our teachers.” Both Union leadership and members are particularly peeved that repeated submissions have been made to this PPP/C Government and its APNU+AFC predecessor, and there has been no movement, with teachers left hanging. According to the Union, at least seven submissions have been made to government starting in 2020, and the situation remains the same.
For its part, the PPP/C Government through the Minister of Education pointed out that the Union was being “opportunistic” and “disingenuous” in protesting while the matter was still under review. The Minister also noted that it is a legacy issue that was not addressed by the prior Coalition Government, and that the PPP/C Government is “working to resolve all of them.” In the interests of both teachers and children, may this come to full fruition soon.
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Feb 17, 2025
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Teachers can’t survive on 100k PM when PRYIA is getting 2 million plus perks PM she should be fired now