Over 60 members of the West Indies Group of University Teachers (WIGUT) marched around the UWI, St Augustine campus on Thursday, wearing white, in what they dubbed the “whitewash march.”
The union members stepped up their protest over stalled wage negotiations and called on the Chief Personnel Officer (CPO) Darryl Dindial “to come with an offer in the double digits.”
In fact, vice-president of the union, Dr Russel Ramsewak said they will only accept a salary increase of ten per cent or more.
Ramsewak stated that they have been awaiting remits from the Office of the CPO for months and they are now annoyed.
He told media that since 2019, WIGUT had submitted its proposal for salary increases to then campus principal Prof Brian Copeland. But he said it was only in May 2022 that this was delivered to the CPO “for assessment and to further the process.
He noted that, “To date, no further action is forthcoming.”
Ramsewak said the campus principal Prof Rose-Marie Belle Antoine last informed them that the CPO assured that he would take the file before an inter-ministerial team within four-six weeks, but he questioned what that meant as it gave them no fixed timeline.
He said: “We are fed up. We are not accepting these open-ended timelines with no fixed decision-making processes anywhere in the horizon.”
Ramsewak added that they have been working on 2014 salaries and “are not prepared to even hear a remit of four per cent. We want that message to be sent very clearly. It must be substantially higher – double digits and above.”
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