Teachers group hails filing of salary upgrading bill

August 6, 2010 | DAVAO CITY – The Kahugpungan sa mga Magtutudlo og Kawani sa Edukasyon sa Mindanao – Alliance of Concerned Teachers Davao City (KAMKEM) welcomed the filing of House Bill 2142 also known as “An Act Upgrading the Minimum Salary Grade of Public School Teachers from Salary Grade 11 to 15”, by the ACT TEACHERS Partylist last Wednesday (August 4).

Currently, the entry-level pay for public school teachers is P15,649 per month. The bill will raise their minimum pay to P24, 887 per month. Public school teachers in elementary and secondary schools, including those in vocational and technical schools and state universities and colleges, whether nationally or locally funded, are covered by the bill.

“We believe that the filing of this bill is a step towards achieving a decent living wage that we have been fighting for,” said KAMKEM-ACT Davao Chairperson Elenito Escalante.

According to Escalante, the low salary of teachers have made them prone to be victims of loan sharks, private lending institutions and even from borrowing heavily from government financial institutions such as the GSIS.

In a recent teachers’ consultation sponsored by KAMKEM-ACT Davao, almost all teachers who attended complained about their GSIS membership. “The GSIS has deprived us of benefits to which we are entitled. We complain of huge deductions on the maturity of our GSIS insurance policy, of being charged with unexplained premiums in arrears, of not receiving annual dividends from GSIS, of being denied survivorship benefits, of GSIS failure to deduct loan payments, resulting in huge interests on loans, of retirees subjected to huge deductions on our benefits,” Escalante recalled their woes against GSIS.  

“We are indeed heavily indebted to financial institutions because of the need to bridge the gap between our low salary and the daily survival of our families,” Escalante lamented.

“We vow to support this bill and we will gather broader support from various teachers’ clubs and associations including the supervisors and superintendents of our public schools.  This is to encourage their active participation in the fight for the immediate passage of the bill considering its urgency and legitimacy,” he said. #