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The leadership of the Teachers and Educational Workers Union (TEWU) has called on its members across the country to exercise restraint as it dialogues with the Ghana Education Service (GES) on the payment of their Continuous Professional Development Allowance (CPDA).
"Leadership of the union is working holistically on all concerns of the non-teaching staff of the GES with particular attention on the CPDA.

“We therefore ask members to exercise restraint while we work together to press home our genuine demands," it said.

This was contained in a communique it issued at the end of a technical committee engagement that was held to look into the issues it raised following the recent strike it embarked upon.

It reminded the rank and file that the union’s industrial action was not called off but suspended and so, could be activated without recourse to the National Labour Commission (NLC) if they felt their concerns were not adequately addressed.

Technical committee

The communique said the government, through the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations, together with other government agencies responded to the union’s industrial action for a meeting which compelled the GES to quickly refer members concerns to a technical committee formed by the GES and TEWU to deal with the concerns and submit a report to that effect.

It said the technical committee started its preliminary work as mandated on January 6, 2022 and continued the work on Wednesday, January 12, 2022.

“Due to the urgency required in dealing with the CPDA issue, the committee decided to hustle it with dispatch and submit a report on the matter before tackling the other concerns of GES non-teaching staff.
 
“The committee, therefore, completed work on the CPDA and submitted a report on it to GES Management on Thursday, January 27, 2022 for consideration and necessary action,” it said.

Concerns

The committee, it said, reconvened on February 2 t0 February 4, 2022 to deal with the other concerns of the union which included the need to review the scheme of service for non-teaching staff of the GES.

The others, it said, were the opening of management positions to both qualified teaching and non-teaching staff, the need to re-align the GES organisational chart to meet current challenges, non-payment of overtime allowance to kitchen staff, non-payment of travelling and out of station allowances to staff, delays in the payment of transfer grant and car maintenance allowance, disparities in the grading system and payment of responsibility allowance to non-teaching staff and some other issues.
 
According to the communique, the committee had finished its work on all the issues and submitted their final report to the GES management.

“The GES Technical Committee working on the concerns of non-teaching staff of the GES met the management of the GES, led by the Director-General, Professor Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa and the leadership of the union led by the National Chairman and General Secretary.

“At the meeting, the Chairman of the Technical Committee, Dr Christian Koramoah (Financial Controller, GES) presented the second part of the committee’s report to the Director-General of the Ghana Education Service”.

Questions

The communique said some questions that came from the GES management to the committee were clarified by the chairman of the committee to the satisfaction of members present in the meeting.

Prof. Opoku-Amankwa indicated to the union that he was satisfied with the committee’s work. The name CPDA, which the committee added ‘Skills’ to , now read Continuous Professional Development and Skills Allowance for a purpose. That would ensure that all non-teaching staff benefited from the allowance, be it professional or skilled staff.

He assured the union that his office would quickly write to the necessary stakeholders, including the union, to enable discussions with the right stakeholders to begin, he said, but, however, cautioned that members of the union should exercise patience with regard to time for the payment of the allowance because some processes would have to take place before the allowance could be paid to members.

Leadership of the union said it would proactively begin discussions with the Chief Executive of the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission, before GES started any engagement with them.