UTech admin staff issue ultimatum to management
Published:Saturday | September 2, 2023 | 12:10 AMTanesha Mundle/Staff Reporter
Disgruntled and frustrated University of Technology (UTech), Jamaica’s administrative staff are threatening to remain off the job on Monday if management refuses to take steps to bring their pay in line with their counterparts in other institutions.
“We will not be on the job come Monday, as long as we have not heard from them, we will not be on the job Monday,” warned Jeanette Grayson, president of UTech Administrative Staff Association (UTASA). The group is demanding that they be granted this increase by month-end and be paid the retro-payments in October month-end.
The workers, who have been agitating and protesting for a parity increase since 2017, on Friday registered their dissatisfaction with management’s reported plan to abort the parity increase for admin staff while granting a similar increase to executives.
Grayson said that the university’s management has asked them to await the Government’s compensation review exercise.
Donned in black, the disgruntled placard-bearing administrative staff assembled outside the university’s Papine head campus to vent their frustration. They blasted what they deemed as a lackadaisical response of the university’s management to fulfil the heads of agreement, including a salary review that has dragged on for more than five years.
‘No parity, no work’, ‘You want peace, give us a piece of the cake’, ‘Stressed and depressed’, a few of the placards read as they openly voiced their frustration and hardship.
Grayson also threatened further action if their grouses were not addressed.
“Depending on what happens during the course of next week, we will be going on different actions,” she said. “We not be letting up until we get some positive response.”
Grayson explained that although the administrative staff have been advocating for parity increase for over five years, instead of addressing the issue, the Government has granted the said increase to the academic staff and this year to the senior management.
In the meantime, she said the staff who have not enjoyed a substantial increase since 2002 are suffering and struggling to meet basic expenses while battling low staff morale.
Grayson explained that the two or three per cent increase that the staff would have received has since been wiped out by inflation.
“Staff loans are now overused, persons are now unable to access staff loans because everybody is going for staff loans to shore up their salary, so it has been hard,” she said.
When contacted, UTech acting President Colin Gyles dismissed Grayson’s claim that management has decided to forgo the parity increase while noting that he was rather surprised by Friday’s protest.
According to him, the university’s management recently met with the finance ministry and the administrative, technical and ancillary staff unions to discuss the issue. He said that the ministry presented two options. The first would be for them to pursue the parity negotiation and to bring it to a conclusion after which the ministry would give the compensation review proposal to the university for consideration. The second option was to forgo the parity negotiation and focus on the compensation review.
However, the ministry noted that if parity negotiation was selected, it would require the engagement of an independent consultant to expand the market survey to include more entities and a mix of salary scales across different sectors of the job market.
Gyles said that when the options were relayed to Grayson on Thursday night, she indicated that the association would be accepting the first option to bring the matter to closure. Hence his surprise on Friday morning.