General secretary of the Unity Workers’ Union (UWU) Caswell Franklyn has not only thrown his support behind the Barbados Union of Teachers (BUT) for staging a sickout last month, but contends it took too long.
The BUT executive urged teachers to stay away from the job on April 24 and 25 and they did so in numbers, with some schools reduced to skeleton staff.
“I am saying that the BUT has finally done the right thing. They should have done it in 2014,” Franklyn said.
“So all the detractors who are going after them and saying all kinds of nonsense probably don’t understand what a trade union is or they got some political connections and they don’t want to come and say ‘I am supporting my party and my party in power now’ and they don’t want to re-institute the term’s leave. Say so, at least be honest with yourselves,” Franklyn said.
He said it should not have taken the BUT more than ten years to stage some form of industrial action.
Term’s leave
The trade unionist also took exception to comments made by educator Dr Dan Carter in the April 27 Sunday Sun, dismissing the term’s leave as “a relic of our colonial past”.
Franklyn said there were other provisions for public servants that were relics of the colonial past – such as pensions. He said those were also set up for expatriates and in the past, only senior civil servants qualified for pensions and asked if those should also be taken away.
He believed the judge erred in sending the BUT back to the negotiating
table with Government. She ruled there was no Act of Parliament governing this but he said that was not so.
“On December 31, 2007, the general orders were incorporated into the Public Service Act by Section 33 of the Public Service Act. The minister may have made administrative orders to give effect to any provisions of the code or any other provision of this act,” Franklyn said reading from the Constitution.
“These are terms and conditions that teachers had. If you want to change your terms and conditions, for future people, yes, they can do that, but you just can’t come and take away a substantive term of my job.”
He said that was why in 1975 when then Prime Minister Errol Walton Barrow wanted to change the terms for pensions, the unions objected, he conceded and so the law went into effect that anyone entering the service at the end of December 1975 would not get both – one from the National Insurance and the other from the Treasury.
Franklyn is of the view that a term’s leave – not holiday – was still needed because teaching was one of the hardest jobs in the world and teachers had to contend with “25, 30 screaming kids from different backgrounds, that would drive most people mad.”
(SAT)
