Standardized Pay

STANDARDIZED TEACHER  PAY PROPOSAL

TEACHERS THROUGHOUT RUSSIA TO RECEIVE SAME PAY?

By Stephen Wilson

 

            

According to some reports, rumors and speculation, a Council of the Federation has proposed that all Russian school teachers, irrespective of their region, will receive the same salary. This was the case during the Soviet era before the rise of unequal pay system leading to glaring inequalities. The council hopes that this system will be in force within approximately a year. A recent statement by a representative of the Committee of the Senate of the Russian Federation on Science, Culture and Education  Victor Smirnov seems to have raised such hopes. He declared: "The absence at a Federal level of a single normative leads to unreasonable differentials in awards to Kindergarten and school teachers."

            

The enormous differences in pay between school teachers is strikingly surreal. While a school teacher in Moscow can obtain around 100,000 rubles a month, a few kilometers beyond Moscow a school teacher can earn 12,000 rubles for the same amount of pay. But it is not just the discrepancy in the salary of teachers. How stimulated pay is provided can vary according to what task a single system devised by a headmistress comes up with. It can be such a complex system that teachers can be baffled as to whether they will be paid for this school task or not, whether it is working on a school journal or taking students on an excursion.  

            

According to Galina Vasileva, a member of the trade union Teacher: "I think that teachers all over Russia will support this initiative to equalize pay with joy. This is necessarily to do and urgent. Because of this humiliating low pay teachers feel as if they have already been forced into a corner.

            

The existing system of pay is unfair. During the Soviet period there was just one tariff scale of pay. Now the pay of teachers differs according to the region. Even within the perimeter of one city the pay can differ. For example, in Petrozavodski in one school where a teacher works 18 hours for 97,000 rubles a teacher who works the same in another school can obtain 82,000 rubles. Why is there such injustice?" According to Vasileva, a teacher should at least receive no less than 22,000 rubles a month.  She states: "A teacher in Russia must not be a pauper. Poverty oppresses and humiliates." 

            

However, the problem with this proposal is how will it be implemented? In Moscow, many school teachers may have received a higher pay, but it was often attained through mass redundancies via optimization {i.e. two schools were merged to cut costs}. What if the drive for equal pay amounts to austerity by other means?

            

Does any school teacher feel great at being told: "Yes we can give you pay a boost but your colleague will have to lose his or her job!" So you have a current situation where in some Russian universities and schools, teachers are told that as many as 50% of teachers are to be made redundant and the head of the department will choose only 'the best teachers'. It is not enough simply to address the unfair pay of school teachers, but a whole host of problems such as insecure job protection, continued unfair dismissal, lack of academic freedom, too much paperwork, too many tests, overcrowded classrooms and the discouragement of any real critical thinking in subjects, not to mention repercussions against school students who dare to use their own reason. Does anyone seriously believe less teachers leads to an improved quality of education?

 

            

Any proposal the government suggests should be sharply scrutinized. We should ask them "What is the catch behind those new proposals ? Do I keep my job or not?" To take a simple example, how do you impose an equal pay system throughout Russia when school teachers in Moscow obtain about 100,000 rubles a month? Do you  increase all the salaries of teachers all over Russia to 100,000 rubles or do you drastically cut Moscow pay down to 22,000 rubles? There are a lot of questions which don't seem to have been fully explored.