UB Faculty Union Demands Action as Pay Raise Stalls Again

Faculty and staff at the University of Belize are reaching a breaking point. Tonight, their union is calling on members to mobilize, after a promised nine percent salary increase appears to be slipping further out of reach. The University of Belize Faculty and Staff Union says the raise was supposed to take effect on April first of this year. Then, it was pushed to August. Now, they’re being told it depends on whether the government increases the university’s subvention. U.B.F.S.U. President Juliane Pasos says enough is enough. Faculty and staff haven’t seen a raise in over a decade. In fact, they took pay cuts during the pandemic, worked from home using their own resources, and watched their salary increments get frozen and stay frozen. To make matters worse, Pasos points out that while the university claimed financial hardship, records show it made over two million dollars in profit in just the last quarter of 2020. The union says it’s time for action and they’re ready to take a stand.

 

Juliane Pasos, President, UBFSU

“In November 2024 the union put a proposal to the administration. We requested four things, a nine percent salary increase. The university employees had not gotten a salary increase since 2025. It has been ten years in the making. Given the cost of living going up and inflation, we decided nine percent was realistic. We didn’t want to put a ridiculous percentage that would require negotiations and back and forth. We put the nine percent as one of those things. We also asked that they restore the lost increments. A part of that was land in kind contributions. That was part of the 2020 agreement so the union and the administration would go an request land from UB inkind contribution. Because we had gotten an increase work load during the pandemic, faculty and staff worked from home using their own resources, getting a fifty dollar compensation per month for internet, not even covering that really. And so with that respect we said, we would want to get paid for that, but if we got the nine percent, the increment, and work on the land, then we would forgo payment for that, because the workload still continued today. We still have that high workload. So, the staff of UB really lost a lot during that 2020 agreement and COVID and it was not necessary because there was no financial exigency. So there was no need for us to sign that agreement. So all of this proposal is now asking the university to live up to its terms and live up to what the employee was affected by.”