Teachers admit in petition to non-compliance with minimum services next week

A public petition in defense of a “general action of disobedience” to the “minimum illegal services” set for a strike in schools on April 26, 27 and 28, according to its initiator, has already collected more than three thousand signatures.

“In this context, a struggle that dragged on over time due to the position of the Minister of Education, who was much more determined to negate the effects of the strike than to listen to the concerns of professional teachers and meet very fair demands. represented by the unions, the teachers have decided not to comply with the minimum requirements recently adopted for the STOP strike from 26 to 28 April,” reads the grounds below.

“They do this because they believe that the minimum services that the Ministry of Education systematically requests from the Arbitration Collegium of the General Administration and Civil Service Department are in fact illegal, which calls into question the constitutional right to strike,” they added to the text.

In a conversation with Lusa, Professor Luis Costa, who teaches at the Mosteiro and Cavada school group in Braga and is the first signer of the petition, which has been circulating since March 23, told Lusa this Sunday that the announcement of minimum service standards for a three-day strike in schools next week. which does not cover any examinations or tests of a national character or evaluation meetings, has led to a significant increase in adherence to the petition, which is “against minimal illegal services.”

In a ruling dated April 19, the arbitration panel decided by a majority vote to declare minimum services for next week’s strike in schools, called by the Union of All Educational Workers (STOP), with the arbitrator representing the workers submitting an application, voting in acquittal. objected to this decision, pointing to “the intransigence of the Ministry of Education, which seems to want to question the right to strike as a fundamental right enshrined in the Constitution.”

According to Luis Costa, when it was created a month ago, the undersigned were of a preventive and preparatory nature, already predicting that the Ministry of Education might in future strikes demand that minimum services be established “without legal grounds”, repeating “expedient” to which he previously resorted to to lessen the impact of the strike.

“The Ministry of Education uses and abuses minimal services, reducing the strike to a ridiculous expression,” said the professor, who, in the undersigned text, cites court decisions, including those in the Lisbon Court of Appeal.

In 2018, this higher court overturned the decision of the Arbitration Board on the minimum services imposed to strike at state examinations and assessment meetings that year, considering them to be a violation of the principle of proportionality, but the decision had no practical consequences, for being issued in October, when there was no more strike.

Based on what is defined in the General Public Employment Law for minimum services in the education sector, as well as the jurisprudence of the Court of Appeal decision, the undersigned consider that the minimum services enacted “clearly violate the framework law which guarantees, defines and limits them — sufficient reason to be considered illegal.”

They also understand that they are violating the principle of proportionality “because in practice they reduce the action and consequences of the strike to a harmless, almost irrelevant expression, that is, they clearly limit this right of the workers.”

Referring to the right of resistance enshrined in the Constitution, “the undersigned teachers declare that henceforth they will not perform the minimum services already established or those that will be established for academic and extracurricular activities, assessments and non-final assessment meetings,” the text says. petitions.

The strike called by STOP on 26, 27 and 28 April is against the new teacher competition system and aims to push for the restoration of all teachers’ service time, a demand that the government still does not accept and that unions have already recognized conducting new strikes by national examinations.

In response, Education Minister Joao Costa said on Saturday that the Ministry of Education “will not fail to activate the necessary funds” for the tests, stressing that the minimum services in this situation are prescribed by law.