JUNT and GOB Negotiating Team Meet After Six Months  

The Joint Unions Negotiation Team met with representatives of the Government of Belize today after seven months. The union’s negotiating team is comprised of members from the Belize National Teachers Union, the Public Service Union and the Association of Public Service Senior Managers. The joint unions wrote Deputy Prime Minister Cordel Hyde a few weeks ahead of today’s meeting proposing eight items for discussion. Among the proposals was a request to have the concluded Collective Agreement between the Government of Belize and the joint unions signed, a call for tax reform, and the establishment of a UN Anti-Corruption Commission. We caught up with the Deputy Prime Minister after the meeting in Belize City who spoke briefly about some of the outcomes from today’s discussions.

 

Cordel Hyde, Deputy Prime Minister

“I can tell you that the big deliverable has been the matter of the CBA that has been sixteen years outstanding. And the particular sticking point for all those years was proposal twenty-two. The big issue being that teacher, particularly at the secondary school level that are not government schools, government pays seventy percent of their salaries and the denominational management pay thirty percent. Upon retirement the government pays seventy percent of the pension, and the management pays thirty percent. But for many years a lot of those teachers who spent many years of their lives teaching were unable to collect their full pension because the managements have had difficulty with that. So, proposal twenty-two from the unions from way back as 2008 was about saying why don’t you take on a hundred percent of those salaries. At the high school level, the tertiary level, not just for teachers, but also for auxiliary staff. That has been a sticking point for all those years. in December the government finally agreed that we would cover that, that we would respond favorably to proposal twenty-two.”