The Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations has invited the leadership of teacher unions to a meeting over their demands for the payment of cost of living allowance (COLA) to members.It said only the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) had responded to attend, with the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT), the Coalition of Concerned Teachers-Ghana (CCT-GH) and the Teacher and Educational Workers Union (TEWU) yet to respond.It said once the other unions were ready for the meeting, it would be held, adding that the government was not insensitive to the plight of teachers and workers in general.
In response, Mr Wireko-Brobbey said the ministry had received letters from GNAT, NAGRAT, CCT-GH, and TEWU that things were hard, thus the need for COLA.Renege“We did not renege on that.
Our minister asked me to invite them so that we exhaust the matters,” he said, adding that “two weeks down the line, we have not been able to get your leaderships.
We are considering looking at a review of the single spine which has been practised for over a decade to see whether it is still relevant or we need to tweak it,” he said.In a presentation, the Director-General of SSNIT, Dr John Ofori-Tenkorang, said the trust’s pension payments exceeded contributions invested at 91-day treasury bill rate compounded quarterly.Evidence“The empirical evidence showed that people who have been on SSNIT pension for 12 years were getting almost twice the value they could have got elsewhere, and it gets better the longer you live.
Why is that so because your contributions have stopped and every additional months that you are living SSNIT is paying more so you can see that SSNIT outlay just keeps on increasing and increasing the longer you live,” he explained.For people who had been on pension for 25 years, he said (85-year olds) looking at all that they accumulated individually, on the average they were getting about 17 times the best they could have got if they had invested their contributions every month in treasury bills and compounding them.
Bokpin, said the unemployment rate in Ghana had almost tripled in a little over more than a decade.According to him, more than 1.55 million people or 13.4 per cent of the country’s economically active population “are out of work.”Presenting a paper on “Ghana’s Workers Pension: An Economic Management Response, he said, among other things, that creating jobs in the economy was good for SSNIT.In his opening remarks, Rev.
For his part, Mr Musah said the issue of pension had been of great concern to teachers, especially when they went on retirement.
Source: Ghanasummary.com
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