The Union of All Educational Professionals (Stop) promised today that it will keep the notice of the strike until March 10 after the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) issues an opinion on the legality of the strikes.
“Stop will not remove any strike notice. (…) There are no negotiations in practice. It is not serious when someone says they want negotiations, and then does not give in, discusses and agrees on the main issues that took more than 100,000 people to take to the streets last Saturday,” Stop leader Andre Pestana said, speaking to journalists at the Palace of Justice in Lisbon, along with lawyer António García Pereira, who provides legal support to the union.
“We have more and more deterrent measures. Minimum services more and more maximum services. Education professionals, judging by what we saw on social networks, are very outraged. This causes even more resentment, even more anger,” he stressed.
“The government does not agree on issues that are unnerving for those who work in schools and that have consequences for our students. (…) We will continue this fight unless the committees, for whatever reason, decide otherwise,” he said. emphasized.
In turn, Garcia Pereira considered the issuance of the PGR opinion a “propaganda operation” carried out by the guardianship authorities, saying that it was “just a legal opinion.”
“Even if the opinion is ratified – or already approved – by the Minister of Education, it will only be an instruction for the services, it has no external force. (…) The only body that can decree the legality or illegality of these strike situations or processes is the courts,” he said.
“This opinion has its own contradictions, because it cannot but recognize that freedom of association is an individual act of each worker, who can accept it and can withdraw it and can renew his membership. The authors of the opinion themselves admit that they are groundless,” he said.
García Pereira added that the opinion “clearly states that this is a right that the worker can exercise, but cannot (…) if it does not suit the government.”
PGR found on Wednesday that there was a discrepancy between strike notices given to the Department of Education and information provided to Stop teachers.
The opinion points to “a discrepancy between previous strike notices sent to the Ministry of Education, which stated that the strike would correspond to the daily working day” and the information provided to teachers by the stop, which on its “website” states that “teachers can determine the specific duration of the period during which they join the strike, making it in these cases a strike with characteristics similar to those of a self-service strike,” ME said in a statement.