Married teachers in both primary and secondary school, or those looking to marry are the biggest beneficiaries of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) signed between their representatives and their employer.
This comes after discussions between the Teachers Service Commission (TSC), Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut), Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers (Kuppet) and Kenya Union of Special Needs Education Teachers (Kusnet) majored around improving working conditions for teachers.
The new CBA agreed on an increased maternity leave from a period of 90 days to 120 days’; that’s from three months to four months.
Promotion of teachers in semi-arid areas
Other benefits include the newly passed pre-adoptive leave for teachers looking to adopt children, and the speedy promotions of teachers working in arid and semi-arid areas.
However, other teachers, especially those who have no families, and may not be going on maternity leave anytime soon, feel short-changed after it emerged that a new CBA for the period between 2021-2025 had not factored in salary increment.
“This is very disappointing. I am a woman, but I cannot bare children, so this maternity thing is going is not going to benefit some of us,” Maryanne who is a teacher in Nairobi told Mwanahabari.co.ke.
The more than 330,000 teachers who had expected a salary raise were left nursing disappointment.
No salaries
This means that teachers will not be receive any salary increment for at least two years.
“All other things are agreeable and we hope members will bear with the circumstances but with the hope that within the next few months or in one year, we will be able to negotiate on the issue of basic pay,” said Kuppet Secretary General Akelo Misori.
“We are also ring-fencing all the gains that teachers have had over the years. One pending issue is on what happens to the basic pay and this is being addressed but we know that once TSC gets the go-ahead within a year or any other period, we will make it known when things improve so that we can get what we had outlined as basic pay,” said Misori.
Next time
“CBA is not an event, it is a process. We want to tell our members that hope is still there. We have room to sit with TSC and review the document,” said Knut Secretary General Collins Oyuu.
“We will review this issue of basic pay. We will look at what was the counter offer from TSC and work with experts to ensure what we come out with will hold water,” he said.