We are fighting to keep our pay from being eroded. Professor Solomon Nunoo, President of the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG), claims that their strike is not based on the Labour Market Survey as is being reported.
Their protest, he claims, is to express their displeasure with the loss of their pay over the last nine years.
On Monday, he said this on PM Express in response to claims made on the show by Benjamin Arthur, the CEO of the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission.
“I’d want to clarify a couple of points. He continues mentioning the government’s white paper on market premium, as you can see.
The same government also mentions the necessity to work on the same market premium every five years, which has not been done thus far.
“And again, Mr. Arthur makes it sound as though our interest is in obtaining the Labour Market Survey report; our interest is in fixing the erosion of our salary that has occurred over the previous 9 years, not in receiving the Labour Market Survey report.”
We are fighting to keep our pay from being eroded
In 2013 the market premium that we were receiving was actually 114% of our basic salary.
“Currently, the market premium we’re receiving because there was a freeze on it and it has become an absolute value, it’s just about 50% of the basic salary, so you’ll notice that there has been a huge erosion when you talk about the money we’re receiving in terms of our market premium at the moment,” he explained.
This he says undermines the Association’s faith in the government’s rhetoric that they’ll be able to meet their demands thus urging them to call off the strike.
“So the concerns we addressed today at the meeting, basically it had to do with the research allowance, the fact that we had signed the contract, and we have still not got the difference in research allowance we were due to be given from October 6th to today, the 10th of January 2022.”
“Also gone were the days when research allowances were always provided in May or June of the applicable year.” We received our research allowance well into October last year before the money began to trickle in gradually. As a result, these are topics that we needed to discuss.”