The caravan of teachers, which will travel along the National Road (EN) 2 for a week, starts this Monday from Chavez as part of an initiative organized by the trade union platform to demand the restoration of working hours.
“For six and a half days, various trade union organizations have been spreading across the country through EN2 the problems of the public school and the teaching profession, which the government does not solve or at least does not even lead to dialogue,” he explained, last week, the National Federation of Teachers (Fenprof).
The initiative comes from a platform of nine education trade unions, of which Fenprof is a member.
Arriving in Faro on May 30, the “EN2 caravan”, as the teachers call it, will include five to six stops a day, with activities with teachers, meetings with students, guardians and the general population, plenary sessions.
According to Manuel Nobre of the Fenprof union in the South Zone, the route through the country “in a sense corresponds to six and a half years of work for teachers, but the government does not want to take them into account.”
The complete replacement of the service period (six years, six months and 23 days) is one of the main demands of the trade union organizations, which have already made themselves available for negotiations with the Ministry of Education for a solution with the aim of restoring this period of service in stages.
The trade union platform has already scheduled a national strike and two major demonstrations for June 6 in Porto and Lisbon, a date that Fenprof general secretary Mario Nogueira believes will be historic either because of the mobilization of educators or because care can finally be negotiated.
If an agreement is not reached, there will also be a final assessment strike starting June 16 for 9th graders and June 19 for high school students.
In addition to Fenprof, the platform of the National Federation of Education, the Union Association of Licensed Teachers, Pro-Order Teachers, the Union of Educators and Licensed Teachers, the National Union of Educators, the National and Democratic Union of Teachers, the Independent Union of Teachers and Educators, and the National Union of Licensed Teachers of Polytechnics and universities.