PM on 8% Salary Increase for Teachers and Public Servants

Dean Barrow

Back to the House Meeting…just before the Opposition walked out and with government coffers overflowing with Petrocaribe money, PM Barrow announced that it was honouring an eight percent salary increase to teachers and public officers for the second consecutive year. But G.O.B. will be spending more than seventy million dollars in three years.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow

“In this fiscal year, as in the last one, the results of U.D.P. imagination, stewardship and stout heartedness are on proud display as our teachers and public servants, our police officer and soldiers—all twelve thousand of them—will benefit from an eight percent salary increase. And for most ten point five percent salary surge when the annual increments are taken into account. The value of this upward salary adjustment is estimated at an astonishing forty-three million dollars for fiscal year 2015-2016. This forty-three million is one and a half time larger than the size of last year’s salary increase and increment. In that fiscal year 2014-2015, teachers and public officers shared a bounty of twenty-nine million dollars more in salaries and increments, representing at that time, a six percent salary increase in addition to two point five increment. So then, in two fiscal years since the partnership was forged between the unions and the government, this U.D.P. administration will deliver a cumulative nineteen percent salary and increment increase for teachers and public officers, the equivalent of seventy-two million dollars more in the collective pockets of public servants. On average that is an epoch-making six thousand dollars more per year for each public servant. A seventy two million wage increase for two years for twelve thousand Belizean workers has simply never happened before in this country; never ever.”