This archive report was first published on 4 November 2019.
On November 4, 2019, the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) announced its decision to terminate its 51-year-old agreement with the Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut), citing a significant decline in membership.
The move is a severe escalation of the long-standing conflict between the TSC and Knut, which has been fought through courts and street protests by teachers.
According to the Labour Act, recognition of a union by the TSC is dependent on it having 50 per cent plus one of all the teachers in the commission's register. With a total of 318,000 teachers in both public and primary schools, Knut needs to have at least 159,000 members to meet this requirement.
However, the commission's latest register shows that Knut, which mostly represents primary school teachers, has only 115,000 members.
The union has suffered a significant turnover since the beginning of the year, following the TSC's decision to stop implementing the 2017-2021 Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) after a court ordered that terms of employment be based on the schemes of service and not career progression guidelines.
As a result, many teachers have applied to leave the union for the Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers (Kuppet) in order to benefit from the Sh13 billion pay rise in the second phase of the CBA.
