The Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR) calls on the Lyceum of the Philippines University (LPU) administration to uphold the labor and human rights of the university’s faculty, in light of the faculty union’s preparations for a strike.

After seven months of negotiations for a Collective Bargaining Agreement, the Lyceum Faculty Association (LFA) filed a notice of strike before the Department of Labor and Employment’s National Conciliation and Mediation Board on March 27.

The LFA’s main demands: that the LPU administration remove its policy of mandatory retirement after 20 years of service and that that faculty members be granted a salary increase that is commensurate with the tuition fee increases imposed by the university.

The faculty members of LPU have every reason to forward these demands. CBA negotiations are opportunities to improve the situation of employees and bring it closer to labor and human rights standards and to what the country’s laws mandate. The Lyceum administration should take heed of its faculty members’ demands.

The “mandatory retirement after 20 years of service” policy is utterly discriminatory towards older people and violates their basic right to work. It is against a rights-based understanding of ageing and must therefore be scrapped. The capacity of older people to teach should be evaluated on a case-to-case basis; experience tells us that many older professors are perfectly capable of teaching.

The policy also creates many problems for faculty members who will be retired – finding a new job at their age and facing a 30 to 35 per cent tax on their benefits that significantly reduces their take-home pay. This policy simply does not uphold Lyceum’s principles of “Veritas et Fortitudo” and “Pro Deo et Patria.”

The law is very clear on the issue of faculty pay and tuition fee, and university administrations cite this year after year when trying to justify tuition fee increases to parents, students and the public.

Republic Act No. 6728 or the “Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education Act,” and Commission on Higher Education Memorandum Order 8, Series 2012 state that 70 per cent of tuition fee increases should go to compensation for universities’ teaching and non-teaching personnel.

It is high time that faculty unions such as the LFA and the University of Santo Tomas Faculty Union (USTFU) are asserting that this provision of the law be truly implemented. Other faculty unions in private universities across the country should follow suit.