An agreement which should have been ready and presented by 1st January 2023, is still being disputed upon while educators are saving their energy for when they can see this agreement, a year and a half later. So shameful and disrespectful towards them.
At this stage everything has been turned into politics. Minister Clifton Grima has no scruples in publishing details of this so-called agreement:
Minister Clifton Grima, the question that this site asks is: Should educators anticipate equal treatment for ALL public service and public sector agreements if and when the pay and working conditions of educators are made public? Minister Clifton Grima, you did not have to resort to digits and numbers to make a point!
If, and only if, what Minister Clifton Grima wrote is true, then educators should consider the following factors before they cast their vote, and determine whether their pay is fair:
Does the starting pay and working circumstances in 2024 attract new educators and teachers? Does it offer a competitive income and benefits package with other alternative jobs? Will the salary increase over time to maintain its competitiveness? Will it eventually reach a limit that is comparable to that of other jobs? Has every teacher received the same raise at every grade level? Will the pay and any upcoming raises be able to weather a jump in anticipated inflation and maintain their purchasing power over time? Should an educator take into account any increases in workload or deterioration of current working conditions? Given that kinder and obligatory education in government and church schools, church and state sixth forms, GEM16+, MCAST, ITS, and JC (which is a component of UOM) all have a same source (changing employers makes no legal difference in this case), are the legal standards of equal pay being observed?
On the other hand, the MUT claimed that the government’s budgetary projections do not take Grima’s boasts of teachers getting a €10,000 raise and new teachers beginning with a €36,000 wage into account. The MUT announced that the talks are stagnating and that the deal must be finalized by May 24.
The union published a screenshot of the most recent offer from the government, dated May 10, to bolster their arguments. The display showed that new teachers would receive an annual raise of €6,000; however, the actual increase would only be €3,000 once previous allowances of €3,000 were subtracted. The union questioned the whereabouts of the €10,000 rise and €36,000 beginning wage that had been promised.
Minister Grima responded by restating that incoming teachers would receive a salary of €36,000. He said the union was disseminating misleading information. If the union persisted in its current strategy, he threatened to make the entire set of confidential negotiations public so that everyone could examine the information for themselves.
Everything is helping to put educators in a worse light than they are already seen. They are just a ping-pong resource in all this, a resource which is becoming more exhausted thanks to an imposed and structured education system where the head is trained but the heart is allowed to run wild; where culture and character are allowed to walk miles apart, because the system wants your heads to be stuffed with mathematics, languages and all the rest – leaving manners, morals, critical thinking and true knowledge and its appreciation out of the picture.