No pay, no work: Students suffer as daily wage teachers stage partial strike on Monday

Islamabad: The aspirants in almost 24 schools and colleges of Islamabad had to miss out on some of their classes after hundreds of daily wage education staff observed a partial strike on Monday to protest against non-payment of their dues for the last 4 months.

The faculty of different schools and colleges staging a protest said that they will continue with their partial boycott today (Tuesday) while on Wednesday they will go on a complete strike to coincide along with the World Teacher’s Day.

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More than 1,500 teaching and non-teaching staff hired by the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE) under the Capital Administration and Development (CADD) in 24 schools and colleges in the capital have not been paid their dues since June.

The staff hired on daily wage basis has also been struggling to get their services regularized for the last 3 years.

In the new budget of 2016-2017, the salaries for laborers have been fixed at Rs14,000.

On September 9^th, 2016 the senate passed a unanimous resolution to regularize the services of daily-wage staffers. Though, the matter of releasing their salaries is still pending.

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These daily wage staffers had warned the managerial authorities that unless they are paid by the end of September, they will start boycotting their duties from October 1^st and on Monday, teachers only took half of their assigned classes.

One striking teachers complained that:

“We did not take four [of our allotted] periods as you cannot teach well when you have no money to run the kitchen of your home for the last four months.”

She furthermore said that the girl’s college in I-10/4 where she works has almost 800 students registered in the evening shift along with only one regular teacher employed for them.

Though, the worst affected educational institute was the Model College where most of the teachers, particularly those in the evening shift, working on daily wages.

The strikes come at the bad when time second term exams scheduled to be conducted in November.