Government Resolves Teachers’ Payment Delays After Threats of Industrial Action

The Ministry of Education says it has resolved the issue of outstanding allowances and increments faced by members of the Belize National Teachers Union. Last month, the union had threatened industrial action over the issue and what they say is an antiquated system being used by the ministry. However, since then, the parties have been able to work out several kinks that led to delayed payments of teachers. Yesterday, Minister of Education Francis Fonseca provided an update on the situation and efforts to improve the payment method for teachers. 

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Foreign Affairs: “I think there may be a few individual cases outstanding. But I think for the most part, based on our reports that we have received back from the managing authorities we feel that over 95% of these issues have been resolved. And we have engaged with the BNTU, of course, since the start of the year and we are, you know, working on any specific individual cases that they bring to our attention. As soon as we find out about them we try to resolve them. So, yeah, I feel good about where we are and we’re planning another meeting I think we’re scheduling it for the 23rd of this month, January, where we will, it’s called a stakeholder meeting, an all-day meeting where we will have the Ministry of Education, we have BNTU, the managing authorities we’ll also bring in the Treasury Department, the Accountant General, Social Security, where we’ll have an all-day sit-down to discuss any outstanding issues and address any concerns moving forward. We have been working on it for more than a year. The difficulty is digitization of all of these records and data and material. So, with any system that you’re putting together the input is critically important. So getting the correct data, you know, has been a very, very challenging process. But we’re well underway with that process. So we’re absolutely satisfied and confident that, you know, going into the new school year, this year, in September of this year, that we will have all of these issues resolved. So that moving forward, not just we’re doing this of course for our teachers now but what we want to put in place is a system that will benefit everybody moving forward. So this will not be a problem for any future Ministry of Education, for any future teachers. So we’re very confident about that. A lot of work has been done. A lot of data remains to be inputted. And we’re working with everybody.”