By Ralph Thompson, Contributor
I HAVE long advocated that if teachers are properly paid, this will allow for the entry requirements to our teacher colleges to be lifted from four CXCs to five CXCs with a minimum Grade II in English. Government will have gained the moral high ground and can therefore require that teachers be licensed the only way to ensure professional performance. This in turn will improve overall teacher competency in the system and result in a more acceptable CXC pass rate.
In the present impasse between government and teachers, the two poles that separate the parties are:
The government can't afford to pay what the teachers deserve given our economic crisis.
The teachers can't afford to live on what they are now being paid.
Is there a practical, pragmatic compromise that can be reached?
I assess teacher's remuneration by adding allowances to basic pay to arrive at a total salary package. To speak of "after tax" take home pay confuses the issue. Every citizen is obliged to pay income tax and this applies to most allowances. To make any meaningful comparison with private sector salaries we must always think in terms of gross salary.
I set out below a range of current remuneration levels in the private sector to serve as background against which to come up with a fair salary for teachers.
Domestic helpers $182,000 p.a. $15,166 per month
General office clerks (two or three CXCs) $240,000 p.a. $20,000 per month
Accounting clerk (four to five CXCs) $420,000 p.a. $35,000 per month
University graduates $600,000 p.a. $50,000 per month
There are six levels of teacher remuneration, each with a starting and ending scale. Using the mean pay in each category (including allowances) the following picture emerges:
Of the total cohort of teachers now in the system, some 21 per cent are untrained and would not qualify for pay based on qualifications. These total 4,359 teachers who are really not teachers in any professional sense.
The remaining 16,000 teachers in the system (assuming equal distribution between the different levels which may not be a fact) have a mean gross salary of $497,237 p.a. Since the differentials between each level are not great, I think the $497,237 figure is a useful one for purposes of the debate.
My recommendations for immediate salary increases would be as follows:
For untrained teachers: an increase of five per cent p.a. or two points above government's present offer. This would put untrained teachers to $236,630 p.a. or $19,719 per month - on par with a general clerk in the private sector.
For trained teachers: an increase of 10 per cent or 7 points above government's present offer. This would put trained teachers to $546,961 p.a. or $45,580 per month somewhere between accountingclerks and university graduates in the private sector.
I calculate the total cost of these recommendations to be approximately as follows:
Government is at present subsidising the "economic" cost of attending a university to the tune of about 85 per cent. Reducing this subsidy to say 50 per cent, which I feel is more than fair given the availability of student loans and scholarships, would go a far way to meeting the increased costs teachers salaries as recommended above.
