LAST week saw the beginning of Scholastic Year 2018-2019. It also saw the staging of rallies from teachers who are seeking a salary increase of P10,000 per month.
There is a problem.
A fully-qualified entry-level teacher is paid, in 2018, a salary of P20,179. This is the salary paid to all government officials, including teachers, who are on Salary Grade 11. This means that the duties of teachers have been analyzed by job evaluation techniques and Salary 11 is deemed to be their appropriate level.
Now that teachers are tied to the government salary grading system, it becomes difficult to justify a Salary Grade 11 teacher to be paid P30,000 per month (the amount being sought by the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT)) without awarding all government officials on Salary Grade 11 the same increase.
There is also a chain effect.
Government officials holding positions on Salary Grades 12, 13, 14, 15 are all earning less than P30,000 per month. If teachers are awarded the salary they are seeking, then the whole of the government salary grading system would have to be reappraised.
Presidential spokesperson Harry Roque explains that under the Salary Standardization Law, salaries will be increased in 2019 and 2020. The increases under this law, however, are small compared with the increase sought by teachers.
The problem has arisen due to the substantial increase, awarded in January, to uniformed personnel including soldiers and police officers. The monthly base pay of an entry level police officer, PO1, is now P29,688. Before January, teachers’ salaries were comparable to police officer salaries.
To award all teachers, of whom there are around 800,000 with a salary increase of P10,000 per month means that the teachers’ salary bill will rise by P8 billion per month. This corresponds to well over P100 billion annually, when allowances are taken into account. Can we afford this?
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At the time of writing, the response of Solicitor General Jose Calida to Maria Lourdes Sereno’s motion for reconsideration had not been received although the Supreme Court (SC) requested it to be submitted “within five days.”
Although, like many, I believe the impeachment process of the Chief Justice should have followed the Constitutional route within the Legislative branch, I am not dismayed if Sereno loses her job. This is because there were several cogent petitions submitted to the SC in 2013 which assailed the legality of RA 10533, the K-12 Education Act. These petitions were not, as far as I am aware, considered by the SC due, possibly, to a unilateral decision by Chief Justice Sereno. If this is the case, then the removal of Sereno would have my support. But to remove her because she reportedly did not submit her Statement of Assets Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) when she was employed by the University of the Philippines seems inappropriate. Furthermore, I believe this aspect should have been considered by Senate and not by her SC peers.
Let’s have a return to the constitutionally decreed separation of powers./PN
