THE Ministry of Social Protection, upon the request of the Ministry of Education (MoE), is expected to nominate the chairman for the arbitration panel in the dispute between the government and the Guyana Teachers’ Union.

The ministry in a statement on Monday informed that the MoE had reached out to them to nominate a chairman, in keeping with the Collective Labour Agreement between the GTU and MoE. This follows after the GTU and MoE could not, by themselves, agree on a chairman when nominees were put forth at a meeting held last Friday at the Department of Labour.

“The parties failed to agree on a common Chairman, thus in keeping with the provisions of the extant Collective Labour Agreement between themselves, the MoE sought the intervention of the MoSP to nominate the Chairman. The MoSP agreed to satisfy the request of the MoE and has since written to the president of the union indicating its acceptance of the MoE’s request. The union was advised also that it would be informed of future development(s) on the matter in due course,” the press release announced.

It was following the end of an almost two week strike of teachers nationwide, that the GTU and MoE agreed, on September 6, to move to the setting up of an arbitration panel that would be responsible for settling the ongoing pay dispute between the two. The arbitration panel is expected to be comprised of a chairman, as well as one nominee each from the GTU and MoE, respectively. The decision of the panel will be final and binding on both the GTU and MoE.

The GTU and MoE have been at loggerheads for some time now over the settling of several financial and non-financial issues, which eventually came to a head when teachers nationwide embarked on strike which began from August 27.

Subsequent to that the parties met on September 11 to begin the arbitration process agreeing on several terms of the Terms of Reference for the arbitration panel. They met again last Friday, September 14, and were expected to decide on the chairman but that meeting ended with both sides rejecting the other side’s list.

The union proposed former Home Affairs Minister Jeffrey Thomas; former Foreign Affairs Minister Rashleigh Jackson and President of a Barbados-based management consulting firm and experienced arbitrator, Dr. Aubrey Armstrong. On the flip side, the Education Ministry proposed Permanent Secretary at the Public Telecommunications Ministry, Dereck Cummings and Human Resource Manager at the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA), Glendon Harris.

According to GTU President Mark Lyte, the union opposed Cummings and Harris because they are both current government employees. In a subsequent statement, the MoE said the GTU’s nominees were rejected, because they are persons who, at one stage in a previous administration, had been “involved in active politics.”