Teachers will hold stop-work meeting

Press, 18 February 1986, Page 4

Teachers will hold stop-work meeting

Christchurch post-prim-ary teachers will stop work on Thursday to discuss the latest breakdown in their pay negotiations.

Teachers called off a stop-work meeting planned for last Friday when new negotiations between teachers’ representatives and the Minister of Education, Mr Marshall, and the Associate Minister of Finance, Mr Caygill, began.

The results of those negotiations were put to the Cabinet yesterday and were rejected. The Minister of State Services, Mr Rodger, said the Cabinet had decided not to change the offer it made last December.

The offer would give increases of up to 34 per cent, taking the maximum salary for a basic scale teacher to $33,000. The package negotiated with Messrs Marshall and Caygill would have made|the

maximum basic salary $35,000.

Mr Rodger said the original offer represented a very fair and reasonable proposition which recognised the recruitment and retention problem in secondary schools.

“It- was clear to Ministers that the recruitment and retention problems in secondary schools are not as serious as earlier predicted," Mr Rodger said.

An Education Department survey last week showed there were 270 full-time vacancies in secondary schools, well short of the 700 to 1000 earlier predicted. Post-Primary Teachers’ Association representatives are angry at the offer. The national president, Mr Peter Allen, said the Government had led the association up the garden path. "If you can’t have faith

in an agreement concluded with Government Ministers, who can you trust in this Government?” he said. The association’s Canterbury regional chairman, Ms Theresa Shaughnessy, said teachers were very angry about the Government’s latest move.

“The shortages referred to in the Minister’s statement are from an Education Department survey, which does not show all the various ways there are of covering the shortages in schools.” Canterbury teachers would vote on Thursday on possible industrial action, she said. “I think people will make their feelings very clear.”

The meeting will be at 8.30 a.m., at Papanui High School. Ms Shaughnessy said she expected most of the region’s 1200 teachers to attend.