Will the New CBA be Short-lived?

Spearheading the effort on the part of government was Deputy Prime Minister Cordel Hyde.  Along with a team of senior government officials, he sat with the Joint Unions Negotiating Team and together they hammered out the terms of the new agreement.  Admittedly, Hyde said the process was at times testy.  Nonetheless, both parties were able to arrive at an amicable management-union agreement.  So, will the C.B.A. be short-lived?

 

Cordel Hyde, Deputy Prime Minister

“In some ways, but it’s substantive too because, the truth is, there was a big sticking issue for all these years, for sixteen years which is Proposal 22 which is a costly one, as the prime minister pointed out.  Over a five-year period, it’s gonna cost sixty-eight million dollars.  No government was willing to countenance that over this long period of time but it was absolutely important to them.  I can tell you that sometimes things got really, really testy over that issue, even within the unions themselves.  But it’s the right thing to do, ultimately you have teachers working for many years in the service, working at institutions where they are getting seventy percent of their salaries from government, thirty percent from private owners and then when they retire, they can only get seventy percent of pension from government and the private owners are the, not the private owners but the church owners.  They don’t pay, they are not able to pay, as they say, so these people, after giving all their lives to public service, I mean it doesn’t get any better than that when you’re a teacher and giving so much of your time, so much of your effort, so much of your being to teaching.”