European Trade Union Committee for Education

With this week’s meetings confirming the  Education Ministry’s insufficient commitment to improve the situation in the education sector, two ETUCE member organisations in Portugal, Federação Nacional da Educação (FNE) and Federação Nacional dos Professores (FENPROF), announce a national teachers’ strike to be held on 21 June 2017. For FNE and FENPROF, this is an inevitable step to relaunch meaningful social dialogue in Portugal for the recognition of education personnel, including non-teaching staff.

FNE and FENPROF ask for a discussion on the Organisation of the upcoming Academic Year (2017-2018).

Moreover, the two member organisations request to:

• eliminate precariousness in relation to teaching and non-teaching staff;
• defreeze the teaching career progression from 1 January 2018;
• careers in the public sector in Portugal have been frozen for nearly ten years;establish a specific retirement scheme for education personnel, to compensate specific attritions implied in teaching and to rejuvenate the profession;
• harmonise education personnel’s working time and the number of students per class in order to establish a clear definition of teaching time and non-teaching time.

Both education trade unions emphasise that within the so-called process of decentralisation of competences for municipalities, current school responsibilities should remain unscathed, and education trade unions should be involved in this debate. The importance of reviewing the current model of school management, aiming at democratising it, is also stressed.

The unions demand to secure their involvement in education and training policy reforms by strengthening their participation in the processes of discussions, negotiations and definitions of education policies. FNE stresses once again the need to respect education support personnel’s rights.

ETUCE European Director, Susan Flocken, emphasised, “ETUCE supports its member organisations in their fight for meaningful and effective social dialogue as a cornerstone for quality education for all in Portugal”.

The action takes place during the period of national tests and examinations at primary and secondary education levels, respectively.

Both unions say that the strike is inevitable unless there is a written commitment from the Ministry of Education with concrete measures to address the identified problems, in some cases for future negotiations.