Deputy Prime Minister Cordel Hyde was the most senior official on the other side of the table. He shared more with us on proposal 22 involving salaries, pension and service benefits of teachers employed by non government institutions.
Cordel Hyde, Deputy prime Minister
"We had a very amicable and respectful and productive meeting. We started a little after 9 and went almost to 3 O clock as we expected. Usually we have very long meetings but are better productive with a whole lot of matters on the table. When we last met in November and was supposed to meet a little after that and we had a bunch of deliverables on our side that we had not delivered."
"I'll tell you the big deliverable that we were able to deliver. There has been the matter of CBA that has been sixteen years outstanding and a particular sticking point for all those years was a proposal 22 you must have heard about that. The big issue being that teachers and teachers particularly at the secondary school level that are not government schools. Government pays 70% of their salaries the managements the national managements pay 30% and so upon retirement government pays 70% of the pension. The managements pay 30% but for many many years lots of those teachers who have given 30 35 years of their lives to teaching to service were unable to collect their full pension because the managements have had difficulty in that. And so proposal 22 from the unions from way back as 2008 was about saying why don't you take on 100% of those salaries at the highschool level at the tertiary level not just for teachers but also for auxiliary staff and for some of the staff members. And that has been a sticking point for all those years. 16 long years and in December government finally agreed this government agreed that we would cover that and would respond favorably to proposal 22 but we have not met as you know we had elections and all that and so that took up a bit of our time."
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