Dear Editor,
The civil servants and schoolteachers should have received their cost-of-living adjustment per January 2010. The WITU and the WICSU, both unions who collect our contributions monthly, have lost their teeth. Back in the days, Claire Elshot would have already laid down the tools and called all the teachers down by the WIFOL building. As for the President of the WICSU in his usual style of dialogue, he would have requested several meetings with the Executive Council to try and resolve this matter.
Now we know it is not a matter of money, as the Executive Council can creatively find means and ways to execute pet projects of the choice of individual Commissioners, such as the building of the church, while the most important asset of Government is being ignored. How much more should civil servants and teachers suffer under the yoke of the NA/Heyliger Government?
The first thing the NA/Heyliger Government did when they came into office was buy new cars for an amount of NAf. 300,000. Every week members of the Executive Council are travelling around the globe, with one reaching as far as taking pictures at the Great Chinese Wall. Now it is off to Germany for Commissioner Mileage. Another one went off to Tallahassee this week to open an office. Then one was off to Holland to meet with S4 students to encourage them to come back home. Wasn't it a couple of months ago that the leader of Government was in the Netherlands and met with the same students?
How would you have brought home these students and you don't have an approved budget? What message are you sending to these students when they read that Government does not live up to its commitments here at home by paying the cost-of-living adjustment when it is due, but you want to convince them to come home? Only poor Hyacinth can't travel – ever asked why?
Now, with the money for the cars, the money for the church and the money for all that travel, I am sure this would have come a long way in paying the cost-of-living adjustment.
Thank you St. Maarten 10-10-10.
Alston Lourens
