The Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) will head into a meeting Friday morning with the Ministry of Finance and Public Service, hoping to strike a deal on salaries and other issues.

However, JTA president-elect Mark Malabver explained to the Jamaica Observer that that if the offer made by the government is not “substantially better” than previously proposed, the educators would be “very agitated”.

“After a number of correspondences between the JTA and the Ministry of Finance, the ministry has finally invited us to a meeting on Friday. We expect that during that meeting a substantially better offer will be placed on the table with respect to teachers. That is our expectation,” Malabver said.

“We will be very disappointed and highly agitated if it is that the ministry does not make a substantially better offer to our teachers, bearing in mind that we are going into our annual conference,” he added.

In an interview with the Observer in June, Malabver said the government’s written response to the teachers’ demands for a better wage offer was not even worth “the paper that Alice used out by Crab Circle”.

“That is how insulted I feel personally for the teachers and what the government has offered. All we are asking for is a livable wage, a competitive salary aligned to the recommendations out of the Ernst and Young report. The Government must demonstrate that commitment to education and to our teachers,” he said at the time.

Malabver said that of the 27 items recommended to the government, the teachers rejected 24.

“The other three items they referred them back to the Ministry of Education or they placed a counter offer on the table. The counter offer they placed on the table is really an insult to teachers. The counter offer to what we asked for is a four-year contract, instead of a three-year contract, and they want to give us zero per cent in the first year and 2.5 per cent increase in the other three years,” he said.

“We have rejected this outrightly. We have also submitted things around retention incentives for our teacher. They have rejected this as well. Our claims are grounded in research and international best practices and standards. It is unfortunate that the Government seems to want to take this thing for a joke,” added Malabver.