6-Year Teachers Pay Discrepancy Exposed in New Petition
A wage disparity that certified teachers employed by the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) are required to bear in their service delivery has been brought to light by Mwingi West MP Charles Nguna.
The congressman said that instructors assigned to fill the same roles received remuneration ranging from Ksh25,000 to Ksh36,000 in a petition he submitted to Parliament on Wednesday, August 16.
Nguna maintained that the problem, which began before the 2017 Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the tutors and their employer, the Teacher’s Service Commission (TSC), was established, had affected over 1,000 teachers.
The teachers were employed as headteachers under Job Group M (now Job Group C5) in 2018 after undergoing interviews for senior graduate teacher jobs.
But after the 2017 CBA was approved, teachers were not moved up to the following job categories where their pay parity was higher.
“Their counterparts who went through the same interview and became headteachers before the July 2017 CBA are now in Job Group D1 and earning higher salaries,” the MP said.
The two types of teachers “are performing the same roles, facing the same challenges, and have the same qualifications but receive different salaries and allowances.”
Nguna claimed that there are anomalies in which certain senior graduate teachers have the position of headteacher while others with the same credentials remain in Job Group C5 rather than Job Group D1.
The legislator added that neither the 12,634 tutors nor the 14,738 instructors who were recently announced for TSC advancements took the impacted people into account.
The petition said, “As a result of the aforementioned concerns, the teachers feel discriminated and are demoralised even as they continue to perform their duties.”
“The professors did their utmost to address and fix the issue, but there were no satisfactory answers or actions. The aforementioned approaches include engaging Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) and writing individual letters to TSC requesting equitable compensation.
As a result, Nguna is asking Parliament to order TSC to evaluate the salaries and benefits of the impacted teachers and retroactively pay them for the time they were deployed in 2018.
The Kenya Union of Post Primary Education of Teachers (KUPPET) reported in February that teachers lost Ksh2 billion as a result of TSC’s five-year delay in promoting around 124,105 teachers.
The union said that TSC’s refusal to promote instructors resulted in their being stuck in the same job grade for a minimum of five years.
6-Year Teachers Pay Discrepancy Exposed in New Petition
