BNTU President says teachers need their allowances

 And then there is the matter of allowances for teachers. BNTU National President, Senator Elena Smith says that a large population of teachers are not getting the allowances they deserve. One of those allowances is hardship and travel allowance for teachers in secondary schools. 

Elena Smith, President, BNTU: “The same way how the Prime Minister gets his allowance and he got an increase and he justified why the four thousand was necessary is the same way how he believes that he has justified we are justified in our fight to ensure that our teachers get their allowance as well. If you can raise your allowance and if you can give all of these judges this huge increase, people who have not made a sacrifice for this country over the last two years and we who have sacrificed so much you will tell me the money isn’t there and you can’t afford it ? That’s nonsense and we don’t accept it. So we will continue to push for our secondary school teachers and their benefits. Again it’s not just that we want and we want and we want because sometimes people look at us as all they want dah money. But we have proven time and time again that as a union we don’t only fight for our members we fight for our country. We spoke about the good governance issues those affect all of us everybody who lives in Belize. So this is a time when we must fight for our own people. If we can fight for everybody else and we want for everybody else to enjoy lower prices of goods then we must be able to fight for our own. And so these are some of the issues that are on the proposal 22 that we must conclude so that we can then go ahead and sign off on our collective bargaining agreement so we can begin a new one. So today members you are seeing the start of several activities because of that meeting that we had and because of the inability of our government leaders to be able to close off on these things. So I want for you to pay keen attention. We are first sharing wit you the information. It is expected that those who should hear will hear, you have ears let them hear. And if it is that they don’t hear and they act like hard ears pickni then we know how to fix that.”