This archive report was first published on 5 November 2019.
Published on November 5, 2019, the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) has served notice to the Kenya National Union of Teachers (Knut) that it intends to revoke the recognition agreement in two months.
The move is a severe escalation of the long-standing wars between the TSC and Knut, which have 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 318,000 teachers in both public and primary schools, Knut needs to have at least 159,000 members to be recognized.
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 huge turnover since the beginning of the year after the TSC stopped implementing the 2017-2021 Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) following a court ruling.
Following the court ruling, many teachers applied to leave the union for the Kenya Union of Post Primary Education Teachers (Kuppet) to benefit from the Sh13 billion pay rise in the second phase of the CBA.
