B.N.T.U. and M.O.E. to Negotiate Hardships & Commuting Allowance

Elena Smith

As to the negotiations on hardships and commuting allowance, Elena Smith says that a meeting will be held on Friday between Ministry of Education officials and branch presidents from across the country to iron out the kinks. This will occur in the absence of Education Minister Patrick Faber, due to Friday’s Meeting of the House of Representatives, but Smith says that in any event the affected teachers won’t be compensated for the first semester until January of 2019.

Senator Elena Smith, National President, B.N.T.U.

“We’ll be having our branch presidents and our executive attending that meeting. And we are hoping that at the end of that meeting, we’ll be able to go over the list of schools, especially those that were downgraded, to see what kind of movements we can make on those schools.  I think the ministry realize that this is a matter that is not going to go away unless we deal with it properly. And so I believe that with the prime minister’s intervention, maybe that is what triggered the change and it is good for us because we felt that we had to have the input of our members because as we keep on saying, the matters of hardship and commuting allowances were things that were dealt with in negotiations. The quantum, those were dealt with there. So if we are going to be changing the schools from one category to the next, then it means that there’s going to be a change in the quantum that these teachers will be receiving. And so that part of it, we believe should be dealt with via negotiating team. And so we felt that our presidents in particular had to be there to explain to the ministry what their teachers go through on a daily basis.”