Lecturers at TTU withdraw educational services to students
The teaching staff of the Takoradi Technical University (TTU) on Thursday withdrew their educational services to the student body.
They did this to state their concern and dissatisfaction with government’s inability to migrate them onto the appropriate conditions of service with regards to public universities.
Mr Peter Awuni, the Chairman of the TTU Chapter of TUTAG, at a press conference, said the continuous delay in migrating the conditions of service of staff of technical universities to the public university level was unfair and unjust.
He said though technical universities have moved on in terms of status and operations, the teaching staff continue to enjoy polytechnics conditions of service and this is unlike the case of University of Professional Studies and University of Education whose staff were quickly migrated onto the conditions of service of public universities.
The Chairman said due to the delay, many lecturers with PhD and other professional qualification continued to leave for greener pastures adding that “any further delay could lead to huge loss of qualified lecturers to other established institutions…we may not achieve the president’s vision of industrializing Ghana through Technical Vocational Education and Training”.
Mr Awuni expressed disappointment at the inactions and failure on the part of the National Labour Commission to give them audience on the matter “although we attended the summons by the Commission to hear our case, the NLC failed or neglected to sit to hear our case and left us stranded at the Commission’s offices.
In view of this, we hereby declare an indefinite sit-down strike having followed the requirements of the labour laws in Ghana…we wish to reiterate our rejection of the preconditions for the migration issued by the Ministry of Education”.
Meanwhile, Professor Stephen Adei, at the first convocation lecture of the Takoradi Technical University urged lecturers to dialogue with the government in finding innovative solutions to their problems.
“Strikes actions are not necessarily a means to an end, but I urge you to adopt lobbying and good advocacy skills to get the needed attention that you deserve as people training the technical manpower for the country”, he added.
Source: GNA