2021-2025 CBA Talks Set To Fail As SRC’s Evaluation Tool Favours Administrators
The university dons and the salaries and remuneration commission, SRC, are yet in another battle over the job evaluation exercise that is in process.
The university teaching staff union, UASU, has strongly opposed the SRC’s job evaluation tool, claiming that it only recognizes their managers and not the lecturers. “The work done by teaching staff will not be duly recognized and rewarded under the evaluation tool being used,” reads a letter addressed by UASU to SRC CEO, Anne Gitau.
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“Under the template, the categorization of responsibilities is aligned to mainly asses managerial responsibility and financial control, which is not in tandem with the mission of public universities of creating and imparting knowledge, undertaking research, and innovation,” cited Constatine Wasonga, UASU secretary general, in his letter to the SRC.
According to Wasonga, the evaluation tool will only benefit heads of departments, deans and directors, whose value is negligible, to the public universities’ mission. He made it clear that professors, associate professors, senior lecturers, lecturers and assistant lecturers are the ones that the evaluation tool should favour more.
UASU complains that the methodology documented in the current SRC circular is not clear.
SRC insisted that their analytical and point -factor based job evaluation models rely on compensable factors to evaluate jobs. Wasonga on the other hand wants SRC to apply the remeasure job evaluation model, which was designed by the price water house coopers, PWC in the 2021-2025 remuneration review cycle.
In response, Gitau says, “the template can be customized by public sector institutions’ job descriptions analysis committees, during development of job descriptions, for as long as generally accepted standards are adhered to.
There is a possibility that the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) talks between universities and unions will collapse since the unions will certainly reject the evaluation results.
Negotiations between unions and the universities should commence once an advice from SRC is agreed upon by both parties.
Discriminative Job Evaluation
UASU fears that the much awaited job evaluation report by SRC may demoralize the tutors again, just like the previous one. The previous job evaluation by SRC even prejudiced tutors of smaller and newer universities. In one instance, it placed vice chancellors of older universities like Nairobi in job group E5 and their counterparts in newer / smaller universities in job group E4.
The discriminative evaluation report placed Deputy vice chancellors of older universities in job group E4 and the rest in job group E3.
