The Labour Division of the Accra High Court has put an injunction on the strike by the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG), putting an obligation on the lecturers to go back the lecture halls to engage in academic work.
The court, presided over by Justice Frank Aboadwe Rockson, yesterday halted the strike which is currently in its fifth week.
The order followed an application for interlocutory injunction by the National Labour Commission(NLC) to halt the industrial action by UTAG
According to the orders of the court, UTAG must suspend its strike until the final determination of an application by the NLC, seeking to enforce its orders for UTAG to call off its strike and return to the negotiation table with the government.
Meanwhile, lawyer for UTAG, Kwasi Keli-Delataa, objected to the motion, and pleaded with the court to deal with the substantive matter before it.
Consequently, the substantive matter for enforcement was adjourned to February 22, 2022.
Barrage of adjournments
On Tuesday February 3, 2022, an Accra High Court directed the National Labour Commission (NLC) to settle its impasse with UTAG out of court.
When the case was called on the said day, 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 the said date, being February 10, 2022, last Thursday.
The 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 was 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.
Additionally, on Thursday February 10, a meeting between the government and the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG) which was aimed at finding a solution to the current industrial action ended in a deadlock.
The meeting, Daily Statesman understands, ended after three hours of deliberations, which was geared towards addressing UTAG’s concerns.
Why strike?
UTAG embarked on the strike on 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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