The Union of All Education Professionals (STOP) will meet on Tuesday with hundreds of strike commissions and union commissions to decide how to react to the minimum services decree, starting Wednesday.
“STOP’s position on the start of minimum services, scheduled for February 1, will be announced on Tuesday, January 31, after meeting with hundreds of strike commissions and union commissions from all over the country,” said this Monday the coordinator of that union, André Pestana. , who was speaking to journalists at a press conference in front of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Coimbra.
The union leader said that “regardless of the minimum services, this great fight will continue,” noting that the union will continue to meet with the Ministry of Education and will be present at the meeting scheduled for February 2.
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André Pestana reaffirmed that the minimum services decree, decided on Friday and coming into force on Wednesday, “it is illegal and unconstitutional, because it violates the fundamental right of workers to strike“.
“In the refereeing college, not only is STOP not represented on the list of possible workers’ referees, but the lottery, in practice, is useless, because the administration, without any justification, through the file of impediments and impossibility of contact, which does not even bother to document, ends up choosing who it wants, violating the principles of truth and transparency”, he criticized, noting that, as long as the current framework is maintained, STOP will not be “available to be part of the staging” of the procedure that precedes the arbitration panel.
Regarding the next meeting with the Ministry of Education, André Pestana stated that he will say that the “miserable wages” for teaching and non-teaching staff “cannot continue”.
Students are not being harmed by unemployment, he stressed, referring to the fact that the real impact on the learning of children and young people is felt from the disinvestment in education, which leads to “tens of thousands of students who, for many months , they are without a teacher for one or more subjects”.
“Why? Because no one wants to be a teacher anymore, because it is an undervalued profession, ”she argued..
Questioned by the Portuguese agency if STOP will proceed with any legal action to challenge the minimum services promulgated, André Pestana said that the union will not opt for that path, since the appeals do not have suspensive effects.
“In practice we are going to continue calling for mobilization, because it was this great mobilization that led the Ministry of Education, desperate, to decree minimum services,” he added.
Regarding the incorporation to the strike this Monday, André Pestana clarified that he does not have data in this regard, since it is a recent union and without a network of union delegates that allows a prompt response on this issue.
Asked about the possible impacts of the strike on the schools that opted for the semester evaluation, André Pestana believes that the teachers chose not to use the strike to disrupt the evaluation processes, as happened at the end of the first period.
The strike called by STOP began on December 9 for an indefinite period.
Source: Observadora
