Teachers demand that service time recovery begins this year | Teachers

Negotiations on the recovery of teachers’ service time begin this Friday with much expectation, but also concern, on the part of teachers, after, last week, the Minister of Finance put on the table the possibility of the return of this time starting only in 2025. After receiving from the Minister of Education an opening for the recovery to begin this year, theThe sector’s unions demand that this return begins as soon as possible. If this does not happen, they admit to returning to the protests.

This will be one of the first points to be clarified in the negotiation meetings, which will take up the entire morning of this Friday.

Last week, in Parliament, the person responsible for Finance, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento, stated that, with the exception of the IRS reduction and the emergency health plan, the rest of the measures foreseen in the Government Program would only be implemented in 2025 , including the unfreezing of teachers’ service time. The unions admit that it may have been “an oversight”, but they want to see the matter clarified quickly.

Moving forward this year with part of the return is essential for the Government to fulfill the commitment made in its program, which provides for the full recovery of service time “throughout the legislature, at the rate of 20% per year” — starting in 2024 and ending in 2028. From what PÚBLICO learned from the sector’s unions, the Ministry of Education did not previously send any proposal to the unions to prepare for this negotiating meeting.

The cost that this measure will have is, moreover, another issue that the Government will still have to clarify. The amount indicated for the recovery of service time is around 300 million euros, but, as PÚBLICO has already reported, the study that, last October, was requested on the initiative of the PSD from the Technical Unit of Budget Support (UTAO) to measure the exact impact of the measure.

Unions with different proposals

In mid-April, unions and the Ministry of Education met for the first time, with Minister Fernando Alexandre admitting his willingness to move forward this year with part of the return of six years, six months and 23 days of service, time that was frozen during the period of financial assistance from troika. The governor said, in fact, that he has every interest in this being done “as quickly as possible” so that “serenity” returns to schools in the next academic year, given the instability it has caused in them.

The Government already knows that the unions’ demands are much more ambitious than the proposal it may have on the table. This Thursday, Fenprof reaffirmed, in a statement, that it intends for the return of service time to be made in three years — and not in five, as predicted by the Government —, starting in 2024, and that “it will not admit a postponement, which could be the first step towards non-compliance”.

The union platform also said that it will reaffirm the proposal it presented at the first meeting, which, in addition to recovering service time, calls for the situations of teachers who have already retired and others who are in levels where they can no longer recover their salary to be corrected. all the time. And that, after the meeting, it will promote a national plenary of teachers and educators, “in which the ministry’s position will be made known and the first forms of struggle to be developed will be discussed, if justified.”

The National Education Federation (FNE) asks that the first tranche to be returned to teachers is 30%, followed by a second in which a further 20% or 30% must be returned, leaving the smaller percentages for the latter. The Union of All Education Professionals (Stop) goes further, asking that half of the frozen service time be recovered this year.

Given the fear that these different proposals could create some entropy in the negotiations, Missão Escola Pública — a civic movement of teachers created last year — called on all unions to present a joint and single proposal for the restoration of service time. . “This must begin to be repaid this year, otherwise everything will be nothing more than a diversionary maneuver for a class that has been so mistreated by successive governments; not giving priority to this matter is wanting to continue last year’s fight and middle”, highlights this group in an appeal sent to union structures. If the first tranche of the return does not happen this year, the Public School Mission also admits to embarking on new protests.