President of the Colleges of Education Teachers Association of Ghana (CETAG), claims that the government has been defrauding members of his union for far too long.
The Colleges of Education Teachers Association of Ghana (CETAG) and the Colleges of Education Non-Teaching Staff Association of Ghana (CENTSAG) have threatened to go on strike on November 11 if the government does not prioritize their welfare.
For far too long, the President of CETAG explained, the government has largely ignored the members of the staff associations working in the country’s 46 colleges of education.
“The members who work in the colleges are one of the few people who have been cheated, slighted for far too long,” he explained. The genesis has been that even though we had our negotiation in 2017, it took us until 2021 before we threatened, we went on strike, and the government decided to give us some kind of compensation for failing to pay what we negotiated for in 2017.
“It means that we were without any kind of service condition from that time until 2021.” When that compensation was given to us, the MOU or agreement we had stated that we would quickly negotiate for 2022 service conditions, which we began in August 2021.
“The anticipation was that we would have finished by December 2021 so that it will take effect in 2022 January. Indeed we can say that we are still around the negotiation table from that time up to this time, talk about the resources we’ve pumped into it, and we still haven’t been able to finish.”
The Union in an earlier press statement to announce their ultimatum to government expressed their disappointment at “the way Government has handled issues affecting the welfare of our members in the colleges of education over the years.”
Some of the issues include the non-finalization of Conditions of Service (CoS) negotiations, the FWSC’s unilateral determination of April 2023 as the effective date for placing First Degree Holders of CENTSAG on 17H on the SSSS, and the Ministry of Education’s undue delay in responding to our request for payment of compensation, among others.
CETAG and CENTSAG insist that “if our demands have not been met by Friday, 11th November 2022, we shall reactivate our indefinite strike actions, which we suspended on January 24 and April 14, 2022, respectively.”
