We'll have more political talk with Faber later, but first to the news that affects everyone with a child in school.
Today's opportunity to speak with the Deputy Prime Minister came after an extended 5-hour meeting that he and other senior staffers of the Ministry of Education held with the Belize National Teachers Union.
As we showed you yesterday, the union was very close to taking industrial action against the Ministry. That's because they strongly disagreed with several amendments that the Ministry wanted to make to the education rules. You'll remember that their biggest concerns included the length of their Christmas Vacation, their employment contracts as educators, and the hiring of emergency administrators and teachers.
According to the executives of the BNTU, the teachers were getting frustrated that their concerns weren't being addressed, and so a poll of the membership said that the next step should be a strike.
Well, that would trigger a crisis, so the DPM and his senior management team at the Ministry held lengthy discussions today to try and find common ground. After 5 hours of back and forth from both sides, Faber exited the meeting to announce that the talks went well. Here's how he explained the tentative agreements that the two sides have reached:
Hon. Patrick Faber - Minister of Education
"On the matter of the first, the Christmas holiday, we discussed that matter, and I put a proposal to the union. The proposal was that we scrapped the amendment because they claim that some sinister, which I tried to assure them was not the case."
"The law as it is now said that if Christmas falls at midweek or beyond midweek, then the holiday starts on Monday, as opposed to the previous week. The amendment would have - if the amendment was not made, the Christmas holiday for the teachers last year would have been just 2 weeks. The Union, through its vice president, made it clear that that was not something that they requested, that they were not interested in amending the rules. So, I suggested that we throw away the amendment then. But then, that brought up the question of the 5 days that were given. And of course, their position with that was that they wanted that to just be forgotten, basically. And I said, but that is not what we are in contractually in agreement with. We need to find the 180 contact days. We ended up saying that in order to see if that is the case, we will refer the matter to the joint education staff, which is made up of representative bodies that are actively involved. And they will determine if indeed, because of those 5 days, we will fall short of the 180 days, and if that is the case, then we will discuss how the time will be made up."
"The second part had to do with contracts, and the main decision that we came up with there was to say that they want to accept the amendment that was proposed."
"The amendment proposed to take out of the current wording of the contract, the portion that speaks about the contract only being for 5 years. The idea was that once you put that in there, once you go to a lending institution or so, that those teachers would be handicapped because the mortgage people would say that you need a longer tenure of your contract, in order for us to be confident. So, we took that out, and that was what the amendment would have done. They have agreed that that portion of the amendment was good, but they wanted us to add another portion or something else to the amendment. They were saying that when that contract was given, as it is recommended now, there is a start date, and it does not take into consideration the teacher's many years of service. And so, we agreed that we will review it. We will have the legal people review it, and find out if there can be a concrete reference made within that contract to show a reference to the service record of the teacher."
"And the third issue that we discussed, or that came up as a result of these amendments, of course, had to do with the hiring of emergency teachers and administrators. Now, they had various concerns in this matter but the major issue, I think, was a portion of the amendment that spoke to a kind of overall point in the amendment that said basically if not these matters that we outlined to be emergency situation is deemed to be suitable for an emergency situation that we didn't take into account then they will look at it, and determine that to be an emergency situation. Their position is that this could be used for mischief. This could be used in terms of a strike and all that to put replacement teachers in, if later they determine that something like a strike is an emergency situation. And so, for the avoidance of doubt of what is intended there, we agreed to put in wording that our legal people will come up with, to suggest that what that that is suggesting should not be interpreted to mean anything with industrial action. And so, they are satisfied with that kind of wording."
Of important note is that according to Deputy Prime Minister, the BNTU is not the only stakeholder group that they have to get consensus on when it comes to these issues. He made it clear that there will be follow up consultation with those other groups to ensure that they are in agreement with today's compromises.
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