In mid-April, public frustration boiled over after it was revealed that Cabinet Secretary Stuart Leslie and government CEOs received salary increases just days after the 2025 general election. Leslie’s new salary is ninety-six thousand dollars a year, while CEOs are now earning eighty-eight thousand dollars. The news sparked backlash from groups like the Public Service Union and the Belize National Teachers’ Union, who’ve been pushing for raises for years. In response, the BNTU staged a protest in Belmopan, demanding an eight-and-a-half percent salary adjustment for teachers. With public pressure mounting, the government quickly formed a negotiating team to meet with union leaders. When asked whether the situation could’ve been handled more carefully, Minister of Public Service Henry Charles Usher shared his thoughts on the fallout.
Henry Charles Usher, Minister of Public Service
“Hindsight is 2020, and I’m not on the morning quarterback. I won’t go back and say, we should have done this or should have done that differently. But what I can say is that if it was as simple as the CEO’s salaries, then the one item on the on the agenda when we met around the table, we’ll remove the salary, increase the CEOs, and that should have brought us back to a level playing field. So certainly that was not the intention of government. When we met with the unions, we met with them because we wanted to have a sustainable way in terms of looking at the salaries in the public service salaries to public officers and teachers. And that’s why another bullet point is the bullet point that speaks about the cost of living adjustment at looking at the consumer price index to see how it is that we can have a formula to look at salaries every year. That looks at the CPI that looks at the cost of living adjustment maybe every year, every two years, whatever is agreed upon so that we don’t get to a situation where you have areas of the public service or teachers or anybody saying, oh, we want this increase. We want that increase. We know that an increase is coming because it’s based on a formula. Included in that discussion was looking at other areas that we can properly compensate our public officers, perhaps looking at housing initiatives, looking at different areas that they can benefit from. We can’t always meet a numerical figure, but we can always try to work with our public officer, with our teachers, with all of the public service to see how we can properly compensate, how we can have what’s the way Minister Fika put it is that it’s a quality of living situation. We want a quality of life for our public officers, for our teachers. That is one that is respectable, one that is dignified. One that they can make sure that they can take care of all of their needs, and that is what we have to look at. On the flip side of that is productivity. We have to make sure that our teachers are public officers, remain as productive as they are right now, and to improve upon the efficiency of service, improve upon the productivity in all sectors.”
