On with the fight for Salary increase now!
“We hope that Dr. Liling Briones learned her lesson well that she cannot silence her lowly paid personnel who were disadvantaged by implementing DepEd Order no.38, s.2017, Mr. Benjie Valbuena, President of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) said.
She issued a new order to strictly implement the retention of the P4, 000.00 ceiling for public servants’ Net Take Home Pay (NTHP) but we cannot fully rejoice on this development because she does not support our demand for salary increase in the 2018 National Budget.
Early on, she claimed that teachers were aptly paid and “too ambitious” to demand for salary increase. We did not budged and rallied in front of DepEd office but our demand fell on deaf ears. She did not even supported at a minimum our demand for salary increase. Indeed, she do not have a heart for public school teachers in particular.
“We called her “anti-teacher“because she cannot even offer sympathy with the core demand on the grounds. Further, she humiliated our ranks by claiming that we just do not know how to manage our finances. Hence, financial literacy is the answer to our predicament of being in a cycle of indebtedness from both public and private lending institutions,” Mr. Benjie Valbuena added.
She also did not raised a howl when President Duterte announced that he will double the salaries of the police and armed forces. That is why ACT have been historically keeping the tradition of militancy in the parliament of the streets as a basic weapon in effecting democratic reforms for the education sector.
“So fellow teachers, we still have an unfinished task. Tomorrow, let us unleash our rage on those monopoly-capitalists’ policies which do not exempt the education for their lust for profit which spelled drastic cutbacks in social spending, rampant environmental destruction, regressive revisions of the tax system, loosened constraints on corporate growth, widespread attacks on organized labor, and increased spending on military “infrastructure. See you all at the gates of DepEd Central office, 1 pm, October 27, 2017!” Mr. Benjie Valbuena ended.
