TTUTA says no timeline for backpay despite ministry assurances

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion says teach­ers are still with­out a clear time­line for re­ceiv­ing salary ar­rears and back­pay for the 2020-2023 pe­ri­od, de­spite as­sur­ances from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion that cal­cu­la­tions are al­most com­plete.

In a state­ment is­sued to­day fol­low­ing a meet­ing with the Min­istry on Thurs­day, TTUTA pres­i­dent Crys­tal Ashe said the union raised sev­er­al ur­gent con­cerns af­fect­ing ed­u­ca­tors, in­clud­ing de­lays in back­pay, con­tract re­newals, leave clas­si­fi­ca­tion is­sues and what it de­scribed as a non-func­tion­al Em­ploy­ee As­sis­tance Pro­gramme (EAP).

Ac­cord­ing to TTUTA, Min­istry of­fi­cials said they had com­plet­ed “100 per cent cal­cu­lat­ing” of back­pay and were “40 per cent check­ing and au­dit­ing,” with the process ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed by the sec­ond week in June.

How­ev­er, the union said no funds have yet been re­leased or iden­ti­fied by the Min­istry of Fi­nance to fa­cil­i­tate pay­ments.

“It MUST be not­ed that no funds have been re­leased or iden­ti­fied pur­pose from the Min­istry of Fi­nance to date thus no clear time­lines can be giv­en as to when ed­u­ca­tors will re­ceive their back­pay,” Ashe said.

He added that the ab­sence of com­mu­ni­ca­tion from the Min­istry of Fi­nance was cre­at­ing frus­tra­tion among teach­ers and the union.

TTUTA al­so raised con­cerns over the re­new­al of Board of As­sess­ment (BOA) and Stu­dent Sup­port Ser­vices Di­vi­sion (SSSD) con­tracts, in­ac­cu­ra­cies in leave clas­si­fi­ca­tion and un­re­solved is­sues in­volv­ing act­ing ap­point­ments ver­sus per­form­ing du­ties.

The union said its Gen­er­al Coun­cil, which Ashe re­ferred to as “The War Coun­cil,” was due to hold an ex­tra­or­di­nary meet­ing to­day to dis­cuss the is­sues fur­ther.

Ear­li­er, the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion said dis­cus­sions with TTUTA formed part of on­go­ing ef­forts to strength­en col­lab­o­ra­tion with stake­hold­ers and im­prove ser­vice de­liv­ery with­in the ed­u­ca­tion sec­tor.

The Min­istry said talks cov­ered teacher salary ar­rears and back­pay, fill­ing va­can­cies, leave pro­cess­ing, in­fra­struc­tur­al up­grades and strength­en­ing safe­ty and health com­mit­tees in schools.

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Michael R. Dowlath said sev­er­al ini­tia­tives were al­ready un­der­way to mod­ernise ad­min­is­tra­tive sys­tems and im­prove op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cy across de­part­ments.

The Min­istry al­so said it was up­grad­ing its tick­et­ing and re­fer­ral sys­tem to pro­vide teach­ing per­son­nel with im­proved track­ing, fol­low-up and res­o­lu­tion sup­port for mat­ters sub­mit­ted to the Min­istry.