The department of education and teachers unions have finally signed off the occupation-specific dispensation (OSD) after protracted negotiations.
OSD means that teachers are no longer treated as mere civil servants under a general salary structure for the public service as a whole. Teachers’ salaries have now been brought in line with their specific professional duties.
Last year during the crippling public service strike, teacher unions refused to sign the agreement to end the strike, opting to negotiate their own OSD customised for the teaching profession.
Based on the new OSD, all teachers will now receive a minimum 4% salary adjustment across the board. This “will be effected as soon as the payroll systems are ready”, according to the department of education.
This comes on top of the 7,5% increase all public servants received last year. Teacher trade unions welcomed the agreement, but said this marks the first step in a long journey fraught with challenges. They said under OSD there are a range of complex and thorny issues that still need to be addressed. These include career pathing, salary progression and linking teacher evaluation with learner performance.
Firoz Patel, Deputy Director General of systems, planning and monitoring in the department, said the new dispensation will benefit all categories of teachers and will be backdated to January this year.
Asked why it took 10 months to conclude negotiations, Patel said: “Parties were serious about getting a lasting agreement in place and had to ensure that the restructuring of the system was able to deal with the principles of equity, fairness, efficiency and quality.
“Quite clearly, the OSD is one of the most comprehensive reviews of teacher remuneration (we’ve had) for a long time and is quite complex,” added Patel.
The South African Democratic Teachers’ Union’s Thulas Nxesi said: “this is just the beginning”, as there are a lot of issues that we still have to thrash out in future. He said the 4% salary adjustment is a positive development for the majority of teachers.
Nxesi said this vindicated the union’s position when it called for a 12% salary increase, although in the end it was whittled down to 7,5%. “If you add the 4% to the 7,5% signed for last year, it takes us to where we were,” said Nxesi.
He said the linking of teacher assessment to learner performance is another vexing matter that could potentially set the parties on a collision path, as the majority of teachers object to it.
Dave Balt of the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa said: “This is an important step in the right direction.” He said it was particularly happy with the 4% salary adjustment and that the employer also allowed for career pathing where teachers would be remunerated accordingly without being lost to the classroom. In the past most teachers opted to work as administrators because they were paid better.