Today’s COLA meeting over strike was successful – MoE

Deputy Public Relations Officer for the Ministry of Education, Yaw Opoku Mensah after teachers boycotted the COLA negotiation meeting with the government on July 12 has said July 13, 2022 meeting over the strike was successful.

In a post sighted by AcademicWeek, the Education Ministry spokesman said any media report indicating teacher unions for the second time walked out of Wednesday’s COLA meeting with the government is untrue.

“Disregard any report of the Teacher Unions walking out of today’s meeting with the Government by the media. Nobody walked out of the meeting. The government had a successful meeting with the unions as expected,” he stated.

Yaw Mensah’s comment comes after the COLA meeting held on Tuesday, July 12, 2022, between the government and striking teachers ended inconclusively after the leadership of the unions walked out from the negotiation table.

Speaking to journalists after the unfortunate incident, the President of the National Association of Teachers (NAGRAT) said the government’s representatives insisted that the unions call off the industrial action before negotiations start.

“They are indicating and asking us to call off our strike before negotiations begin. So all it means is that the government side is not ready to continue negotiation unless the teacher unions call off the strike,” Angel Carbonu said.

The General Secretary of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) on his part said “I think that what has happened today is very unfortunate. What we can say now is that our negotiation has come inconclusively and we are still on strike”

“They have held all organized labour unions hostage and this is a betrayal of trust because the understanding we had was that organized labour has been convened for us to find a solution to the issue of Cost of living allowance (COLA)

Right now, since we are undesirable, we think that before they even walk us out of the meeting, we are walking out of the meetings ourselves,” the GNAT General Secretary, Mr Thomas Musah told journalists after the meeting ended.

The teacher unions (GNAT, NAGRAT, TEWU and CCT-GH) on July 4, 2022, in a joint statement, announced their decision to embark on an industrial action to register their displeasure over the government’s failure to grant them 20% COLA.