The National Association of Graduate Teachers' president, Angel Carbonu, has explained why a meeting between organised labour and the government on Tuesday to end the current strike by teachers union members came up empty-handed.
He claimed in an interview with Citi FM that the administration, which showed up to the scheduled meeting in force with all of its ministers and delegates from relevant institutions, seemed unprepared to work with organised labour.
Organized Labor held a meeting in the NAGRAT Lyceum before the conference yesterday, when we made various decisions, including ones involving the teacher unions. The government no longer meets with teacher unions because this problem has risen beyond them; instead, it meets with organised labour. I seriously doubt that any organised labour organisation was absent yesterday.
"We anticipated that the government would offer a percentage, we would negotiate, and that percentage would, of course, serve as the foundation upon which the teacher unions would also announce that, yes,.... depending on how the negotiation goes, we have gotten this far so we call off this strike and then we continue discussions and so on and so forth. There has been a choice made.
"Government came in with all of its might - Finance Minister, Security Minister, every... just for them to come and declare that they want to see the teacher groups apart from the other organised Labour people, and the other organised Labour people were quite upset by this announcement," I was astonished to learn that you were now separating us. We refused to say it was wrong because many believed it was a divide and conquer strategy. The goal of this gathering is to talk about COLA with organised labour. There is nothing else on the schedule.
The argument then became: Are we here to find answers or are we here to win legal battles? The government refused, stating that they would not talk if any union is on strike. When we entered caucus, they gave us five minutes as requested; but, by the time they left, it had been one and a half hours. Before we knew it, a security team of the honourable ministers had arrived to retrieve baggage they had left at the conference.
The teacher unions responded by saying that if we are the impediments to their negotiations or if we are the undesirables, then let us go and sanctify the meeting so that they can continue their negotiations with the other groups because we cannot hold other labour organisations hostage. So we went outside.
Can you believe we left? We then learned that even they had left, at which point other unions left, which is what occurred yesterday.