And while those are the deliberations for this year, in the near term both sides also have to hammer out a collective bargaining agreement.
Fonseca made it clear that's very much a work in progress:
Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"We discussed that at the end of the meeting, at the end of the meeting the union raise that issue. At a meeting in December with prime minister, I was at that meeting, the joint unions met with the prime minister in December. At that meeting, we agreed to a timeline to look at the CBA. We said that we wanted to by no later than around June we wanted to come up with a framework for settling and finally signing off on the CBA. We're hopeful that can be accomplish, the framework moving forward, so we have certain things we have to do, we have to do a lot more data collection. We don't have accurate information regarding some of the outstanding issues on the CBA. So we've agreed to make sure we get all the accurate data, that will allow us to make good decisions but we want to keep to that timeline so we still have a few months to work out the finalization of the CBA."
