Teachers seek pay hike

Noting that the fourth tranche of t he salary increase is “not enough,” a group of teachers reiterated its demand for a “substantial” pay hike.

Teachers from the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) renewed their call for “substantial salary” increase following the announcement of Department of Budget and Management (DBM) Secretary Benjamin Diokno the 4th tranche of the salary adjustment under Executive Order 201, s. 2016, will be released next month.

The group also denounced the “lamentable increase in their salaries while top government officials receive as much as 1100,000 additional to their already 6-figure income.”

ACT National Chairperson Joselyn Martinez said that the 4th tranche of the Salary Standardization Law (SSL) “only amounts” to an increase of 1575 for Teacher I, 1789 for Teacher II, and 11,008 for Teacher III, and it is “us who compose around 90 percent of the workforce in public basic education.”

ACT also lamented that President Duterte “will receive an additional 1101,656” while Diokno may “receive as much as 171,601 more” so “it is impossible to miss the injustice here.”

Martinez also argued that these amounts “hardly cover the erosion in our salaries due to the TRAIN-induced surge in inflation last year, which were implemented by the very people in our government whose salaries were barely hurt by the rise in prices of basic commodities.”

Educators belonging to Teacher I, II, and III ranks will receive 2.8 percent to 4.2 percent salary increases under the 4th tranche of pay hike, which are way below the 5.2 percent inflation rate in 2018. Duterte, on the other hand, will receive a 34 percent increase on his monthly salaries. “We are hoping that this is not what the President was referring to when he claimed to want to raise our salaries this year,” Martinez said.