European Trade Union Committee for Education

The weeklong strike in Macedonia has ended. SONK has called off the strike as the Education Ministry has promised not to implement the monetary punishment of teachers if they failed the external evaluation. This was a main demand and was discussed in the meeting last week between European Director Martin Rømer and the Education Minister. Since then communication have been in place and SONK and ETUCE insisted that this element in the new laws on education should be removed.

"This is a huge progress" said Jakim Nedelkov, President of SONK. "There are many other problems we need to solve including a raise in salaries, but now negotiations have started on all issues. We are grateful for the intervention of ETUCE which is clearly international solidarity in practise."

The conflict started mainly because a new set of education laws included an element of punishment of teachers if their evaluation of the students were not in compliance with the external evaluation. Teachers would risk to be fined 50 € out of a salary of typical 350-400 € per month. For some time the social dialogue has not been working and SONK called on ETUCE to intervene.