Biz Groups Support Moderated Teachers’ Pay Hike

Business and professional groups on Wednesday endorsed the proposal of fiscal and education authorities for moderated adjustments in the pay of public school teachers.

“We believe that better education is a top national priority. We recognize, appreciate, and value public school teachers as central to this goal, aside from being important leaders of our communities, including during election time, and they deserve to be compensated better and given better training opportunities and tools,” the groups said in a statement.

The groups include the Action for Economic Reforms, Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines, Foundation for Economic Freedom, Makati Business Club, Management Association of the Philippines and the Philippine Business for Education.

“In light of recent demands for an immediate PHP10,000 a month increase, however, we ask President Duterte and the teachers to phase this over time considering fairness and equity of public school teachers’ pay compared to other civil servants, and the recent increases in their pay,” they said.

Citing that educators with Teacher I position earn 58 percent more their private school counterparts and Associate Professors earn 109 percent more than those in private universities, the groups said “raising the disparity in pay between public and private school teachers would further fuel the migration of private school teachers to public schools, and exert financial pressures on private schools whose tuition fees are regulated by government”.

They said there are other issues which must be considered to ensure quality education nationwide — teachers’ training opportunities, teaching tools, and classrooms.

“On the macro impact on the fiscal sector, the PHP150 billion annual cost of the salary increase is roughly 1 percent of GDP (gross domestic product). To appreciate the magnitude of this, we note that the entire annual budget for the CCT (conditional cash transfer) program, which benefits 4.3 million households and promises to break inter-generational poverty, will cost less than half of this,” the statement read.

Referring to Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion law or TRAIN 1, the groups noted that “there is no identified recurring source of funding for the requested salary increase”.

“As such, it will raise the national government annual fiscal deficit from 3 percent to 4 percent of GDP. The last time our fiscal deficit to GDP breached 4 percent was in 2002 and 2003, driving the country’s credit ratings down by two rungs and this led to higher borrowing cost to both government and private sectors, and lower investments,” they said.

They added unmanaged salary increases and poorly targeted subsidies could lead to “economic collapse which recently happened in Venezuela”.

“We thus commend the efforts of the Secretaries of Finance, Education, and Budget to improve the pay of our public school teachers while preserving the country’s economic gains. And we fully endorse the proposal of fiscal and education authorities for moderated adjustments in pay which are phased, reflect recent salary adjustments made, benchmarked to the market and other civil service employee comparators, count the benefits of TRAIN 1 on their take-home pay, and are matched by new revenue,” the groups said. (PNA)