KINGSTON, Jamaica — President of the Jamaica Teachers’ Associations (JTA), Doran Dixon, says the entity he heads will take industrial action against the Portia Simpson Miller led-administration if wage talk negotiations between the two are not better managed.

The president told OBSERVER ONLINE today that the JTA “is totally distraught about the Government’s handling of negotiations”.

“We’re about to activate our industrial actions committee so that when we have our meeting on the 28th of this month, our general council meeting, we will likely [vote] to take industrial action if there is no word from the Government in terms of the start of our negotiations,” Dixon said.

Negotiations between the Government and the workers’ organisations representing its employees were to have started last month.

But the outlook for completing the negotiations by the end of March — as Minister of Finance and Planning Dr Peter Phillips insists — looks bleak, and the issue of whether any increase at all can fit into the Government’s efforts to reduce its wage bill to nine per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) is clouding the issue.

The five-year wage freeze agreement that the teachers, as well as other public sector workers, entered into with the Government comes to an end on March 31.