TEWU to seek redress at Labour Commission

EXECUTIVES of the Teachers and Educational Workers Union (TEWU) say they are preparing to lodge a complaint with the National Labour Commission (NLC) after their employers reneged on an agreement to pay their salary increments.
The General Secretary of TEWU, Mr Daniel Anim-Antwi, told the Daily Graphic that a 17 per cent salary increase for this year that should have been paid to members in two tranches from August did not materialise.
He said the government and the executives of TEWU had agreed that the arrears from January to July would be paid in two instalments, with the first being paid in September and the second in October, but no payment was made by the government in either month.
Local executives of TEWU, therefore, met a week ago and agreed to a resolution demanding full payment of the arrears in November and forwarded their concerns to their management, that is, the vice-chancellors of the universities.
Mr Anim-Antwi said no response had been had from the vice-chancellors, for which reason a meeting was held yesterday with their members to brief them on the development.
He stressed that the executives of TEWU had not declared any strike and that they expected their members to go back to work after the meeting.
To those who had not gone back to work, Mr Anim-Antwi said he had already appealed to them to continue working as normal, as the executives resorted to the options available to them to address their grievances.
In an interview, a source at the University of Ghana, Legon, said although there had not been an official declaration of a strike on the Legon campus, many of the workers had taken advantage of the situation to stay away from work.
The source, who would want to remain anonymous, said many of them reported for duty yesterday but refused to work as expected.
It said members of the union were expected to meet their executives today for a final decision on the matter.
Meanwhile, reports from the Kwame University of Science and Technology (KNUST) indicate that many of the workers who belong to TEWU failed to perform their duties yesterday.
Our Ashanti Regional correspondent, Kwame Asare Boadu, reports that academic work at KNUST was disrupted by the indefinite strike embarked upon by members of TEWU over unpaid salary arrears.
Critical areas, including faculty libraries, were locked as the members of TEWU stayed out of work.
That followed the expiry of a one-week ultimatum they gave to the government to pay their seven-month salary arrears.
On the KNUST campus, some of the workers wore red armbands and roamed about, chanting war songs.
A source at the College of Art and Social Sciences told the Daily Graphic, “They are not working. We don’t know what is going to happen in the coming days.”
According to some of the striking workers who spoke to this paper, the government had taken them for a ride for far too long and it was about time they reacted.
They insisted that they would return to work only when the arrears had been paid in full.
According to them, the government wanted to play tricks on them and that was why it had released just three months of the arrears owed them, adding that until everything was released, they would not get to work.