Statement by the KRSU press service
August 28, 2020 infotainment portal kaktus.media published an article «A week before the start of the school year, KRSU announced staff and salary cuts». The publication, citing anonymous teachers of the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University, stated that «a week before the start of the school year, on September 25 (quoted verbatim), the management of KRSU gave its employees an unpleasant surprise – issued an order to reduce wages by 50% and layoffs».
These statements are made despite the fact that the portal accompanied the publication with a copy of the university order dated August 25, 2020 № 396-P. This document only talks about making proposals on the issue of changing «the list of divisions taking into account 50% of the reduced wage fund», and also indicates possible ways of their implementation –providing individual employees with leave without pay for the period from September 1 to December 31, 2020» (according to the legislation of the Kyrgyz Republic, leave without pay to an employee is provided upon his written application and its duration is determined by agreement between the employee and the employer) and the abolition of incentive payments. The administration recommended discussing these issues in teams.
The measure proposed by the university – forced and temporary. It is due to the epidemiological situation, a reduction in cash receipts from payments for contract training, as well as the decision of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Kyrgyz Republic to start the academic year in higher and secondary vocational educational organizations using distance learning technologies. The latter circumstance requires special responsibility and imposes an additional burden on the teaching staff, while at the same time freeing up a certain part of the teaching and support staff from performing duties in new working conditions. However, there is no talk of reducing staff, especially teachers.
Based on the above, the press service of the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University states that the above article is unreliable. Taking into account this fact, as well as the fact that the infotainment portal kaktus.media, by publishing unverified material, it gave rise to the dissemination on its platform of tendentious, fake information about the university and its employees that discredited their honor and dignity; the editors were asked to publish a refutation.
The University also draws the attention of law enforcement agencies of the Kyrgyz Republic to the nature of the comments of individual authors, which are clearly provocative in nature, and asks that they be verified in order to legally evaluate the statements.
Press service of the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University
