GEORGETOWN, Guyana (CMC) – The Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) said on Monday that it is assessing the response to its call for a general strike to press demands for increased salaries for educators.

The industrial action comes at a time when students are preparing for the National Grade Six Assessment examination and the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate Examination.

“We are currently assessing the turnout, but generally, teachers indicated they are in support,” GTU president Dr Mark Lyte told the online publication, Demerara Waves Online New, after the police said they had received reports, “indicating that persons are being intimidated and threatened.”

But Lyte said “I am not aware of any threats issued by GTU to teachers”.

Prior to the industrial action, Chief Education officer Saddam Hussain warned that if the teachers went on strike, their action would be illegal.

“To be clear, the MoE (Ministry of Education) has received advice from the Ministry of Labour, the experts on this issue, that conditions for strike action have not been met as a result of which any such strike would be wholly illegal and unlawful,” he said in an open letter to all headteachers and teachers.

He said if the teachers heed the strike call, students’ preparation for the National Grade Six Assessment and Caribbean Secondary Education examinations could be affected now and in the long term.

“The threat of industrial action sets a bad precedence since this is the final term before the NGSA and CSEC exams. Any disruption to the teaching-learning process could affect individual children and their future thereby hampering the ability for families to use education to exit poverty,” Hussain said.

The union has been told that the industrial action by the teachers is in violation of the memorandum of agreement signed between the union and the Ministry of Education.

Chief Labour Officer, Dhaneshwar Deonarine, said the grievance procedure has not been exhausted, and that he had declined the union’s request for the matter to go to arbitration as there was an attempt to breach the grievance procedure.

In a statement on Sunday night, Education Minister Priya Manickchand said the Irfaan Ali government has satisfied 25 of the 41 benefits that had been requested by the GTU along with 28 others that the Education Ministry did on its own “to improve the lives, capacity and professional standing of teachers.”

Last year, the government ignored repeated calls for collective bargaining and instead engaged a cross-section of teachers to hear their grievances and requests.

Senior Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh in a statement last December announced an across the board salary increase of 6.5 per cent that will benefit over 54,000 public servants, teachers, members of the disciplined services and government pensioners and will place an additional GUY$7.5 billion (One Guyana dollar=US$0.004 cents) in disposable income annually in the hands of these employees.