Off to London

A colleague told me he has become a satisfied customer of motorcycle ride-hailing service Angkas.

This week I urged him to be extra polite to the driver, because the guy could be a teacher who has left the profession to earn more in the bike service.

Benjo Basas, national chairman of the Teachers’ Dignity Coalition, told “The Chiefs” last Tuesday on Cignal TV’s One News about the teacher, who now makes about double his P23,000 pay as Teacher 2.

Benjo said another teacher has opted to become a fireman, because personnel of the Bureau of Fire Protection have the same pay scales as members of the Philippine National Police. The entry pay in the PNP is P30,000 – nearly P10,000 more than the P20,754 starting salary for public school teachers.

Let’s hope the Bureau of Corrections does not recruit teachers to replace the hundreds of sacked guards in the New Bilibid Prisons. Basas told us that the BuCor has in fact sent out a help-wanted alert on social media. If the NBP guards get higher pay, we might lose more public school teachers.

Those who join the teaching profession in this country are aware of the sacrifices that go with the work, the long hours and modest pay. But Jocelyn Martinez, national chairperson of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers, said educators also go hungry and have children to send to school.

Martinez told The Chiefs that apart from the low pay, public school teachers are often expected to provide for their own laptops and the other modern tools for education.

“We need to go to London to buy laptops, to buy projectors,” Martinez sighed.

Why London? She explained: “Loan dito, loan do’n.”

In time, they pile up so much debt that the P20,754 take-home pay of a salary grade 1 teacher could effectively go down to just P5,000 a month. Once a teacher begins incurring debts, “it’s very hard to get out,” Martinez said.

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At least they can still make jokes about their plight. The exodus of teachers, however, continues, according to Basas, and this is no laughing matter for the country.

As mandated under the Constitution, education gets the biggest slice of the annual national budget pie. About 70 percent of the amount goes to salaries. Education officials, however, say that there are simply too many teaching personnel so raising their pay is tougher than in the case of the police and Armed Forces.

The teachers want their entry-level pay to be at par with the police and military’s P30,000 a month. Basas’ group is proposing an across-the-board increase of P10,000 at least for the 832,000 Teachers 1, 2 and 3.

President Duterte, whose mother was a public school teacher, recently said a pay raise of “35” for teachers “is coming.”

Department of Education Undersecretary and spokesman Nepomuceno Malaluan could not tell us what the “35” meant exactly: an increase of 35 percent or P35 a day, or a base pay of P35,000 a month?

At a Senate budget hearing this week, teachers were told that the government might be able to afford only a 21 percent pay hike, to be paid in tranches over three years, or seven percent a year.

This means the entry-level Teacher 1, with salary grade 11, would see an increase of about P1,400 a month.

There are proposals in Congress to increase the non-salary benefits of teachers, according to Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, who chairs the committee on education, arts and culture. These include a supply allowance of P10,000 a month, he said, plus an income tax holiday when the teachers are rendering election duties.

Measures are also being pursued to create more teaching positions to open opportunities for promotion and consequently salary increases.

Basas, however, notes that such efforts have been going on for a long time. He also thinks that the proposed supply allowance is for P10,000 a year.

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People keep calling teaching a noble profession, Basas says. But the salary is a manifestation of the importance attached by society to a profession, he points out. He notes that under the Duterte administration, cops and soldiers have been given priority in salary standardization, ahead of teachers and health professionals.

Even if there are more teachers than cops and soldiers combined, Basas and Martinez stress that there is money to give teachers a significant increase.

Gatchalian and Malaluan point out that other civil servants are also demanding a pay hike. “It’s a very difficult balancing act,” Gatchalian told us.

Even the Supreme Court, which has ruled that nurses deserve higher salaries under the Nursing Act, also qualified that actual payment of the increase would need legislation to provide funding.

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Martinez says there are funds available, but it’s a matter of priorities. The priorities of the Duterte administration, she says, are the uniformed services and Build Build Build.

The pay hike can be sourced, she says, from the P95 billion that Duterte vetoed in the much-delayed budget for 2019, and from the reported P100 million in pork barrel-type allocations for each member of the House of Representatives (denied by HOR members).

Gatchalian has proposed that P54 billion be sourced from the vetoed P95 billion, so that Teachers 1, 2 and 3 can see their monthly pay raised ASAP to P25,000, P27,000 and P30,000, respectively. The Department of Budget and Management told Gatchalian that P54 billion is a lot of money.

With activities marking National Teachers’ Month, which culminated on World Teachers’ Day on Oct. 5, critics have also taken the administration to task for its funding priorities: a junket for a large retinue of sycophants in Moscow, one of the world’s most expensive cities, and now a P2-billion private jet for the use of the President and (again) military and police VIPs.

While they gift themselves with jetsetter status courtesy of taxpayers, Juan and Juana dela Cruz must jostle for rides and slog through horrid traffic because the Light Rail Transit 2 is crippled for up to nine months.

Martinez, a third grade Math teacher, has been a Teacher 3 for 18 years. She wants promotion to master grade, but there are so few positions open, she says.

With weak prospects for upward mobility, teachers continue to be lured away from the country by jobs overseas. Martinez says teachers get six-figure monthly salaries in neighboring countries, not only in Asia’s wealthiest such as Singapore and Taiwan but also in Malaysia and Indonesia.

In the case of the Philippines, Martinez says, “our net take-home cannot even take us home.”