The Union of All Education Professionals (Stop) has given new pre-notices to strike for the assessment tests between May 16 and 26, and is also considering new forms of struggle.
In statements to Pp, the coordinator of the union, André Pestana, said that the strike to the exams that ended on Thursday had a high adherence and there are new pre-notices of strike between May 16 and 26, for which no minimum services have been decreed.
“What we have felt is that the adhesion to the strike has been growing, so much so that we have received [information] – and we will take this to court – that high officials related to the Ministry of Education are giving indications to replace teachers on strike, a clear illegality. Any worker on strike cannot be replaced, which is serious,” he said.
Stop’s coordinator said that on Monday the union will have a meeting with the Ministry of Education with the “accelerating point of the progression”.
“We have not yet received the proposal from the Ministry of Education, but we continue to reaffirm that the only way to restore justice without creating asymmetries is clearly equity between teachers from the mainland and the archipelagoes, a full count of service time,” said André Pestana, admitting that the union is available to negotiate “the speed at which this count would take place.
According to André Pestana, the teachers want full counting as happened in Madeira and the Azores.
“We also have other important issues concerning the operational assistants who have miserable salaries and need to have the right to training during working hours, change the ratio because they are exhausted, the problems of the technical assistants who are undervalued and practically stuck to the minimum wage and the higher education technicians with ratio problems, which in many schools is one psychologist for a thousand students,” he said.
André Pestana also said that next week there will be a members’ assembly, and new forms of struggle are on the table, among them a strike against evaluations.
“But only at the meeting will it be decided what forms of struggle will take,” he said.
The STOP coordinator is this morning at the Basic and Secondary School of Vialonga, in the municipality of Vila Franca de Xira, in the district of Lisbon, to participate in a plenary with workers of the establishment.
“We came to this school in Vialonga, which is very dilapidated and is one of the few that still has a situation that should have been eradicated by now: asbestos. Stop was the first union to fight against asbestos, with more than two months of strikes and we managed to get a national plan for the eradication of asbestos, with a budget of millions of euros, but this school still hasn’t received that attention”, he said.
In the plenary, besides the professionals’ problems, the issue of asbestos will also be addressed, according to André Pestana.
After the first five days of strike against the assessment tests, there will be another strike between May 16 and 26, which coincides with the 5th grade physical education and 8th grade information and communication technology tests.
