UWI educators 'starving' for salary increase
Published:Tuesday | January 23, 2024 | 12:38 AMAinsworth Morris/Staff Reporter -
'While the grass is growing, the horse is starving!'
That's the best proverb Professor Hubert Devonish, leader of the West Indies Group of University Teachers (WIGUT) Jamaica's negotiating team could use yesterday to describe the disgust of tertiary level educators at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, who protested outside the gate of the campus earlier in the day.
According to the university educators, they were ignored by the Government during the public sector compensation review process, but are now being brought to the table late and, in the interim, while the negotiation process takes place, they are pleading for an increase of approximately 25 per cent on their salaries.
"It is so late [that] we are starving. Therefore, give us something [25 per cent] to hold and that's what we are pressing for right now," Devonish told The Gleaner.
When asked why they decided to take their grouses to the streets outside the entrance of the campus on Monday, and not await word from Dr Nigel Clarke, minister of finance and the public service, he said, "We got to do something".
Devonish said that, on January 4, Clarke set up a tripartite committee made up of the UWI union, The UWI Mona and the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service to look at possibilities of what an interim pay adjustment could be.
"We as the union, as WIGUT, are asking for 25 per cent as an interim while the compensation review takes place, just to hold us until this process that should have been done a year ago, gets completed," he said.
"The ministry has accepted the principle that we should have something to hold us. Not that they have accepted the 25 per cent, at least not yet, as far as I know, and they set this committee which is meeting right now and will report at the end of January," he said.
At the same time, the demographic of educators in question is really seeking a 60 per cent increase to be on par with the salaries of their counterparts at the UWI campus at Cave Hill, Barbados.
"We are a part of a regional institution and we are behind in salaries, so the 60 per cent is about what it will take us to get to the lead campus," Devonish said in seeking to explain their demands.
Amid droplets of rain, he said the university staff members chose to protest on the morning of the first day of the new UWI Mona semester, because the educators' pay issue needs to remain in the minds of students.
"Our gathering today was really to support the process, to say we are pledging solidarity with the members of the negotiating team and seeking solidarity amongst the student body, because we are trying to explain to them why our pay matters to them and what happens when we don't get paid; what happens to their education going forward," Devonish told The Gleaner.
He warned that staff members at The UWI Mona will soon resign and migrate as a result of their current low salaries and the monthly expenses they have to pay.
Given that The UWI educators are internationally mobile, he said a primary reason for the protest was administrators' concerns that staff will leave for better pay, making it difficult for the university to remain viable as a high-quality institution.