An Accra High Court has directed the National Labour Commission (NLC) to settle its impasse with the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG) out of court.
When the case was called yesterday, the presiding judge, Justice Frank Rockson Aboadwe, gave the parties up to Thursday, February 10, 2022, to return to court and report back on the progress of the out-of-court settlement.
The presiding judge also called the parties from open court into his chambers for an in-camera discussion.
After the in-camera session, counsel for UTAG, Kwasi Keli-Delataa, told journalists that the NLC would be allowed to move its motions, if a consensus was not reached by Thursday.
NLC was in court seeking enforcement of its orders defied by public university teachers in the country. NLC earlier directed UTAG to call off its strike, which is in its fourth week, but this directive was not adhered to.
The teachers had defied the NLC’s order while insisting on a resolution of their demands.
The strike has brought vigorous teaching and learning to a halt on public tertiary university campuses, and threatens to dislodge the academic calendar.
Why strike?
UTAG embarked on the strike on last month January 10, calling on the employer to restore members to the 2013 Interim Market Premium (IMP) of 114 per cent of basic salary.
They also want the government to go ahead to formulate guidelines to implement the appropriate recommendations to address the general conditions of service of the university teacher.
It is the case of UTAG that the IMP, which was instituted after the implementation of the Single Spine Pay Policy, was frozen, per a government White Paper in 2013, for the purpose of the conduct of a labour market survey (LMS) to determine the MP payable to workers deserving of it.
UTAG contends that till date, the determination has not been made, which has resulted in the erosion of the university teacher’s salary.
In its release declaring the strike on January 7, this year, the UTAG Council said there was the hope that, by completing and implementing the LMS Report of 2019, a review of the IMP would have put the university teacher on a relatively good salary stead.
“Regrettably, the recommendations of the 2019 LMS Report, without any accompanying technical report on the implementable MP, is meaningless to UTAG, as it does not address the pertinent issues of improved CoS,” the statement had said.
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