Teachers to strike May 11 over nonpayment of salaries

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Newly recruited teachers in Ghana have served notice they will stay off the classrooms on May 11 due to the inability of the Ghana Education Service to process their salaries.

“It’s now difficult to believe the promise given by GES. We demand that all newly recruited teachers receive their 7 months salary in full and by the end of May. This means all the newly recruited teachers must receive their IDs and go through their biometric registration on or before the mid of this month 15th May, 2019,” a statement from the Association of Newly Recruited Teachers said.

It added: “We are therefore by this release urging members to stay away from the classrooms (sit down strike) from 11th May 2019 indefinitely when the gold track students resume their second semester until a radical change is seen in resolving the issue at stake.”

Below is the full statement:

*ASSOCIATION OF NEWLY RECRUITED TEACHERS THREATENS TO GO ON STRIKE OVER FURTHER DELAYS IN PROCESSING OF SALARY PAYMENTS*

We the association of newly recruited teachers have observed with much worry and utterly shocked at the snail pace our Employer, (Ghana Education Service) is adopting to process our salary for payment. It would be recalled that we issued a Press Release on 19th March, 2019 captioned,’ “Government starves newly recruited teachers”, to drive home our concerns the inability of our employer to process our documents for salary payment.

The GES responded to our press release blaming their inability to process our Staff IDs on network and connectivity challenges as a result of migration from IPPD2 to HRMIS on 20th March, 2019 with caption ” Salary Concerns ”.

They promised to work on those challenges to effect payment as soon as possible. On 25th March 2019, GES came out to assure us of steps they are taking to hasten our salary payment by employing some VPN technology as reported on page 18 of Daily Graphic with caption ”GES resolves salary delay challenges, newly recruited teachers to be paid in May and June”.

We came out with another release on 27th March captioned ”Association of newly recruited teachers respond to GES over delay in salary payment “.

In this release, we acknowledged the measures the GES is taking to resolve those challenges and we demanded that; 1. they should make sure they release our staff ids and get our biometric registration done by 30th April 2019. 2. our salary and its attended arrears be paid in full starting from the day of appointment (1st November, 2018). On the second day of April, GES released the first batch of IDs for the various regions and dates for the biometric registration.

The data below shows the number of IDs released so far by GES as at 1st May, 2019

From the table, it’s obvious that

1. GES has failed to honour the deadline given them by making sure all IDs and biometric registration are done by 30th April 2019.

2. Some regions have fewer IDs particularly Upper West and Upper East with Volta Region recording none.

3. Their promise to pay us in April as captured on a recorded video by the Director General of GES didn’t happen. (Kindly click on the link for the video: https://bit.ly/2VDqsV5 )

4. It’s obvious that their promise to pay us in May and June is not feasible judging from the fact that about 30% of IDs have been released nationwide.

In the light of the aforementioned, the association is not assured of the government and GES compliance to resolve our challenges. It’s now difficult to believe the promise given by GES. We demand that all newly recruited teachers receive their 7months salary in full and by the end of May.

This means all the newly recruited teachers must receive their IDs and go through their biometric registration on or before the mid of this month 15th May, 2019. We are therefore by this release urging members to stay away from the classrooms (sit down strike) from 11th May 2019 indefinitely when the gold track students resume their second semester until a radical change is seen in resolving the issue at stake.

Thank you

Source: Daily Mail GH