MOE Officials to Meet with JUNT

 The Ministry of Education will also be meeting with members of the Joint Union Negotiating Team which includes the Belize National Teachers Union (BNTU), the Public Service Union (PSU), and the Association of Public Service Senior Managers (APSSM). The meeting is geared at discussing the pension reform for public workers. The proposal being made by GOB is that the pension scheme should be contributory. However, PSU President, Dean Flowers, says the public sector workers will not be roped into paying into yet another scheme. Minister Francis Fonseca says they will be outlining the details of the pension reform in the upcoming meeting.

Hon. Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education, Culture, Science and Technology: “Pension reform is on the table for discussion but yeah we have not come up with any proposal as yet so we haven’t tabled any proposal to the joint unions because we’re not at that point yet. Once we have a proposal in place of course we’re going to table it for discussion with them and again we’re going to approach it in a spirit of good faith and hopefully we can arrive at some resolution. The bottom line is that you know we need pension reform there’s absolutely no question about that. The current structure is unsustainable so we will have to have pension reform the question is what model will that take, what structure will that take and when will it be implemented. Those are the discussions that we have to have but it’s a very very important issue and yes it will form a part of our discussions on February 15th.”