At the end of September the conversations in the staff room are often alike. “Did you receive your salary? “, “Ah! I was only paid half of my hours”. This is what many teachers report to us, including Opaline Meunier, municipal councilor for the city of Mons, who spoke publicly on social networks: “Salle des profs ce midi. Half the piece didn’t receive their September salary. Some were sent back to the CPAS while waiting, others heard “well, madam, you have to know, you have to put it aside, huh”. I’m lucky, they paid me half of my hours. The other half will be regularized in October”.
“Every year it’s the same,” says Opaline Meunier, “As long as you’re not named, you end up with administrative problems at the start of the year. Sometimes you have to do one or two months with partial pay or even without pay. It’s really not correct and it scares away young teachers who start the profession. The shortage is not only a problem of vocation”.
A special year
These payment problems have made more noise this year. “We received a little more reports than usual for this kind of concern” says Roland Lahaye, secretary general of CSC teaching.
“The recurring problem comes from the fact that to pay the teachers, you have to send a whole bunch of documents before the 10th of each month. When a professor starts working, there are even more documents to turn in. The payment problems then come from the administrative slowness of this process,” explains the secretary general.
Add to that the fact that teachers do not always know what classes they will have before the start of the school year or that a teacher does not always start a replacement before the 10th of the month and we come to these problems.
“It’s been going on for years. According to the FWB, the process will go better when the documents become electronic,” says Roland Lahaye. Does this mean that you just have to put up with the situation then?
“What is also not correct is that the employer is obliged to advance the teacher’s salary when the latter does not receive it from the decentralized management. But no one does that under the pretext of a lack of liquidity.
This year, a technical problem was added to the usual setbacks. “The General Education Administration has identified some 500 temporary teacher files out of more than 130,000 whose salary could not be paid on time in September, while their file was transmitted on time to the ‘Administration. This situation is linked to an encoding problem that could not be resolved in time despite the very significant efforts made by its services. A solution has been implemented to allow payment of salaries to those concerned no later than Wednesday, October 5. The general administration of education apologizes to the staff members concerned, ”informs the Wallonia-Brussels Federation.