Teachers' strike over pay

When Kenya Union of Teachers (KNUT) called its members on strike in 2012, it was hoped that the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) would step-in quickly and help resolve the teachers’ grievances, thus, bringing the strike to a quick end. I didn't think that this was realistic, or even possible. As it turned out, the SRC did not bring the teachers’ strike to a quick end.

In an unpublished article of January 11, 2013, I noted:

It is not clear whether the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) has a role to play, or even understands its role in the ongoing teachers’ strike over pay. The Commission’s activities so far do not point to the possibility of its ability to resolve issues pertaining to the levels of remuneration within the public sector. 

The ongoing, and the planned Job evaluation exercises, will not determine levels of compensation for the public sector. The basic pay, or the total wage bill in any organization is arrived at using economic considerations such as the cost of living, community wage levels, fiscal policies, and the organization’s ability to pay and sustain the wage bill level over time. After this, a job evaluation exercise may follow.

The purpose of a job evaluation exercise is to remove inequities in a compensation structure after the structure has been installed in an organization. The exercise uses well established methods of comparing the relative weights/worth of jobs within the organization with the intention of ensuring fairness and equity in the compensation structure. The process begins with a thorough job analysis, writing job descriptions, and sometimes may require the job analyst to construct a job evaluation manual for the exercise. The stakeholders must be involved in this process at every stage for it to earn credibility.

Back to the teachers’ grievances: were the teachers to expect the SRC to come up with a solution to their grievances, then they would have to wait for a long time before their demands could be met. It is unlikely that their demands could possibly be met through a job evaluation exercise. 

As the matters stand, the SRC is attempting to have job evaluation exercises conducted across different organizations. Supposedly, the teachers’ salaries will be determined through such an exercise. Unfortunately, this will not work. It is not possible to conduct a job evaluation exercise, comparing, say, jobs in the Judiciary, Parliament, government ministries and departments, teachers’ jobs, jobs in the counties - that do not exist as yet - and other institutions in the public sector, all in a single exercise. Each one of them is set up and structured uniquely - each, for clearly defined unique purposes. Any attempt to undertake a single job evaluation exercise across such organizations would be an exercise in futility.

Indeed, the results of the ongoing job evaluation exercise for the State Officers’ jobs, for instance, may be difficult to justify, since a State Officer’s job can be evaluated only within the entity it is a part of. It should be obvious to any competent job analyst that psychometric measurements, such as job evaluations, can be conducted only within the parameters of the organization being subjected to such measurements, and not across two or more organizations. The premise on which the current exercise is based cannot be justified.  

If studies (since the era of Civil Service Reforms and re-structuring programmes) of this elusive area of organizational development are indicative of the kind of results to expect from the ongoing, and similar planned exercises, then the teachers and others in the same situation, may have to brace up for a long wait before credible and defensible compensation structures for the jobs they perform can be established.

The SRC can draw lessons from earlier attempts on job evaluation exercises that were generally ill-designed, besides being inappropriate for the jobs at hand.

It is important to mention that the teachers’ strike was triggered by the failure of the government to honour a collective bargaining agreement of 1997.

If we fast forward to 2016: the teachers went on strike again over the same issue. Thankfully, as the year-end approached, the teachers called off their strike. According to media reports, the teachers’ pay would be “untouched as agreed in the CBA”!