The meeting this Thursday, April 20, between the Ministry of Education and unions, ended without an agreement and with teachers threatening to continue with strikes until the national exams if the guardianship refuses to recover all the frozen service time.
«The Ministry of Education does not admit to recovering any day of service time. The Minister says that it is not in the Government's program, but it is in the teachers' program», said the secretary general of the National Federation of Teachers at the end of the meeting with ministry officials.
Fenprof is part of the platform of nine union structures that again discussed the tutelage proposal to accelerate career progression and minimize the asymmetries caused by the freeze and that the unions have warned that "leaves out many teachers".
Mário Nogueira recalled again that the guardianship proposal leaves out teachers who work, for example, in hospitals or prisons, as well as in Casa Pia or Santa Casa da Misericórdia.
Aimed at teachers who worked during the two periods of career freeze (since 2005), the tutelage's proposal provides for them to recover the time in which they were waiting for a vacancy in the 4th and 6th grades from the year of thawing ( 2018), which are exempt from vacancies for access to the 5th and 7th, in addition to the reduction of one year in the duration of the step for those who were also waiting for a vacancy, but are already above the 6th.
The platform decided that it will ask for an extraordinary meeting that will not be «to discuss commas» of the document presented by the ministry, but rather to pressure the guardianship to reach an agreement on the recovery of the six years, six months and 23 days of career progression that are yet to recover.
The opening of a number of vacancies equal to the number of teachers who wish to access the 5th and 7th levels is another of the demands of the teachers, added the general secretary of Fenprof Mário Nogueira.
Without an agreement, the unions promise to continue fighting and threaten with new protests, in addition to the district strike that has been taking place since Monday and will end on May 12 in Lisbon.
The possibility of carrying out a strike for the national exams is also on the table: «the teachers have told us that and we have not ruled out any scenarios, only if there is a solution to these problems», added Mário Nogueira, stressing that the teachers would prefer that it wasn't necessary.
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