Korle Bu TEWU members on sit-down strike

Members of the Teachers and Educational Workers Union at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital have abandoned their offices to protest the withdrawal of some allowances owed them, and issues on their migration onto single spine.

The TEWU members, who comprise staff of the Ghana Medical School, University of Allied Sciences and the Hospital’s Dental Clinic, say they will not return to work if their concerns are not addressed.

Joy News' Michaela Anderson was at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital and reports that TEWU members there were clad in red attire and arm bands protesting the withdrawal of their allowances.

Also joined in the strike are surgery assistants, gardeners, cleaners, librarians, laboratory assistants and mortuary attendants. Work there has come to a standstill, she reported.

They displayed a number of placards; one had the inscription “we no go sit down make they cheat us”.

The workers told Joy News they would only return to work if Fair Wages addressed discrepancies in the salaries of members following their migration onto the Single Spine Salary Structure.

TEWU Chairman of Health Sciences at Korle Bu, Sulemana Karim, told Joy News the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission must also resolve their current condition of service which he said "expired in 2008".

Meanwhile, the Cape Coast University Primary School in the Central region has been closed down as a result of the strike by the Federation of University Senior Staff of Ghana (FUSSAG).

Whilst the University JHS has resumed classes, teachers there are not in classroom because of the strike.

One of the teachers told Joy News' Central regional correspondent Richard Kojo Nyarko that though they are on strike, they could not stop the pupils from coming to school.

She explained that the school was not built for the teachers neither for administrators nor the union but for the pupils so "maybe they will find a way to study".