Teachers’ unions are disenchanted with government measures that have led to an exodus from the profession, writes Philippa Garson
THE writing’s on the proverbial chalkboard: tough times lie ahead for teachers left behind after 15 000 of their best have been paid tens of millions of rands to stop teaching.
Many have breathed easy at the lack of strikes and protests by teachers over the past couple of years. The Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC), set up in 1995, was – and still is – lauded as the answer to labour unrest in the teaching corps. The ELRC has bestowed legitimate labour rights on all teachers, granting them proper channels to air their grievances so they don’t — thank God – resort to “chalk downs” and abandon their classrooms.
But lately there are signs that the honeymoon is drawing to a close, with teachers’ unions recently walking out of talks with the government in the ELRC. Unions are growing impatient with the “mature bargaining” they say has translated into false promises. The directive from the finance department is: if you want to pay your teachers well, then accept there will be fewer of them.
Increasingly, there are signs that the Sword of Damocles hanging over the rest of the public service in an era of right- sizing and fiscal discipline, is also going to fall on teachers. The 380 000 teachers comprise a significant section of the 1,2- million-strong public service and slot in at a relatively high level on the broad banded public service salary scale. They consume 25%, the largest chunk of the annual R58-billion public service wage bill.
Unions say the government has reneged on key agreements struck in the ELRC, notably Resolution Three of 1996, which gave teachers significant salary increases and pledged further increases for the next three years. It has become clear that there were “trade-offs” in the agreement teachers’ unions and government signed – trade-offs which the unions were blithely unaware of at the time.
Already the government’s redeployment strategy has been dubbed by angry unionists and teachers as a betrayal – “nothing but retrenchment through the back door”.
To date, very few teachers have been redeployed. There is a growing realisation that teachers can’t be “pushed around like chess pieces”, as educationist Rosamund Jaff from the National Business Initiative (NBI) put it. “Most have families. They are not mobile. The government has gambled that in today’s economy, teachers cannot afford not to go.”
One government official admitted that more of a “stick” and less of a “carrot” approach may be used to get teachers to move to posts far from their families. However, it may just be that those who don’t take voluntary severance packages, or can no longer get them, will be retrenched. “What was going to be redeployment is increasingly likely to become retrenchment when we need the best teachers for the new curriculum,” said Jaff.
Many schools are simply freezing posts. Provinces implemented the ELRC agreement as a cost-slashing exercise, with scant regard to which teachers were opting for the voluntary severance packages. The biggest teacher union – the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu)- expected the packages to be offered to teachers as a “privilege”, not a “right”, to those surplus teachers who could not move to other schools. Instead the packages were granted left, right and centre, before redeployment had even started. Now an unconscionable amount of money has been lavished on packages, draining the system of 15 000 of the most experienced teachers.
Sadtu, struggling to reposition itself in an era where its ideological allies – and many of its former leaders – are in government, is fast having to learn how not to be a sweetheart union. Sadtu has had to abandon ideology and embark on a crash course in combat. “The question of cut- backs is seriously undermining transformation,” said general secretary Thulas Nxesi. “The government argues that 20% of the budget allocated to education is high. But South Africa has no infrastructure for the majority of people. We have to build more classrooms and train thousands of teachers who are not yet up to scratch. In addition, we have to retrain teachers to cope with the challenges of the new curriculum.”
But the salary issue is something of a Catch-22 situation given that the teacher wage bill swallows 80% of the education budget. Jane Hofmeyr, also of the NBI, argues that a too powerful ELRC could impact badly on education.
“Salary increases will mean cut-backs on other expenditure – textbooks and new classrooms, for example. We will have fewer teachers who are paid relatively high salaries and the education system will suffer as a result. And no one is facing up to the inevitable trade-offs,” said Hofmeyr, who also criticised the “incentive” encouraging teachers to study for an extra year which will give teachers an additional R10000 per annum for a fourth year of study.
“In four years there will be serious problems with the size of the wage bill,” she said, recalling words of warning from an educationist with international experience: “Contain the salary bill otherwise the quality of education will decline.”
Philippa Garson is a freelance education writer
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