Will the government unfreeze increments for teachers and public officers effective April first? That was the only real question going into today's meeting of the joint union and government's negotiating team at the Government House in Belize City.
Government has already agreed to unfreeze the increments - but wanted to do so later in the year; while the unions want this increments restored right at the start of the fiscal year.
The meeting lasted about 4 to 5 hours and when they came out, Education Minister Francis Fonseca that the difference between both sides is now 3 months and that elephant in the room, pension reform:
Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"We have had discussions on this issue for several weeks and the real difference in our positions has been the effective start date of the unfreezing of those increments so initially we had proposed September 1st. After discussions in Cabinet, we brought that forward to July 1st. The union's position has always been that it should be effective April 1st, 2023. Today they presented us with some additional information which I think provided some context for a better understanding of how perhaps some public officers could be negatively impacted by a later start date so there could be some discrimination, if you like. So that additional information I think will help us to go back to Cabinet. We've undertaken to take that additional information back to Cabinet and to make the case for perhaps moving it forward to April 1st."
"We also of course they talked about the two lost increments that they have suffered and we have said to them obviously that's not something we can do this fiscal year, we're prepared to continue having a discussion with them about how that can be looked at in the future so that's going to be an ongoing discussion in terms of those two lost increments."
"The other issue of course, the other big issue is pension reform. We agreed in principle that we would approach pension reform in two stages really. First, the government would implement a new pension scheme if you like for new entrants into the public service and we're aiming to do that effective around July 1st. Obviously there's a process that leads up to that, we'll have to prepare legislation and everything and we undertook to consult with the union to share that with them and have a discussion with them on that. And then of course we have to have much tougher discussion in phase two about the long term sustainability of the pension scheme and what changes would have to be made to the existing scheme that would affect public officers in the system now. We agreed that we would set up a working group that would tackle that issue so no decisions were made about phase two, we would set up a working group that would work through that issue over the next few months then that working group would come up with specific recommendations about how we could proceed with respect to phase two."
