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This afternoon, you may have had to make arrangements to pick up your school children a little earlier than usual. That’s because teachers all across the country were called to emergency meetings with their Union’s Branch Leadership.

These meetings were activated under emergency provisions because the leadership wanted a mandate on how to proceed on a number of issues, including the request by the Prime Minister for the teachers to hold off on their final 3% increase for their salary adjustment.

Now, according to the Ministry of Education this meeting was called at the last minute, and that caused them to fire off a scathing press release basically scolding the union for not giving due notice.
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We’ll get to that later, but first, we waited outside the emergency meeting for the Belize City Branch, and we got an opportunity to speak with National President Luke Palacio. He told us that neither he nor Belize Branch President Kathleen Flowers could get into the details of today’s discussions because there is protocol that they must follow. They must first report back to the Union’s Council of Management before there can be any public disclosure.

But, he did take the Ministry head on for the suggestion that they should not have called this meeting because of the disruption of classes it caused. He told us this evening that the Union makes no apologies:

Luke Palacio - National President, BNTU
"The BNTU is a council of management. That council of management decided that we are have to an emergency meeting of all our branches throughout the country today Thursday commencing at 1:30 PM to discuss matters of grieve concern to our union. That meeting the decision taken was that it is an emergency meeting; the council of management believes that it is high time that our unions start to address a number of issues including quite a number of national issues that almost all Belizeans speak of on a daily basis. In relation to the protocol there is no protocol when an emergency meeting is to be called. The union believes that we are to have our meeting, we asked our membership to come out to a meeting to discuss their concerns. I heard on one of the news media earlier today the Chief Education Officer alluding to a process that should be followed. It is so unfortunate when people try to mislead because that memo she speaks to is about 19 years old and I will be providing you all with a copy each of the media houses; so you can review it for yourself. There is nothing in this arrangement and agreement that we had with the Ministry of Education way back in 1997; that union would be allowed to have quarterly meetings for those quarterly meetings we are to inform the ministry and management two weeks ahead. That we have done because usually in the month of September and October we have our first quarterly meeting for the term and then again in February - March we have another set of meetings for which we are required to give the two weeks’ notice. If the Chief Education officer doesn't understand what the word emergency means; you cannot be talking about emergency meeting and you are going to have it two weeks later that just doesn't make sense."

Daniel Ortiz
"Now sir it seems like the letter reads as some sort of scolding of the union like you did something wrong; that you need to be held accountable for."

Luke Palacio - National President, BNTU
"There is nothing wrong, unions are there to promote workers’ rights. Unions are there to deal with grievances and disagreements and ill matters that the membership wants it union to act on. We are not saying that we are not concerned about our children as a matter of fact; the fact that we were able to go back into the classroom on Monday despite all the negative happening in this country we could have taken more drastic action but we are a responsible organisation. But we also need for our people to start to understand that in this country in this day and age and time we need to start to look at things differently. Of course no management, no ministry will be happy with the actions that we are taking but that is our prerogative as a union."

"If there is an industrial issue that you want...an industrial relation issue that you want to address a number of people just walked out. We decided okay we are going to inform the management we are not asking for permission because this is the mistake that Dr. Babb continues to make and some management continue to make. We were not asking them for permission to have a meeting; we were informing them that we are going to have a meeting of our members."

That Council of Management meeting happens on Saturday, on the Saint George’s Caye Day holiday. That’s where the branch management from all the BNTU office countrywide will sit down and discuss what the consensus is on different issues, including the final 3% salary adjustment.