Stop Union to Celebrate Week of Strikes in Schools from 18 to 22 September

The Union of All Education Workers (Stop) announced this Thursday a one-week strike from September 18 to 22, calling on workers to secure strike funds in schools.

“At the end of this week of strike, on the 22nd, on Friday, we will organize a national demonstration of all education workers in Lisbon,” said STOP leader André Pestana at a press conference in Coimbra.

The leader recalled that the teachers of the Autonomous Districts have already been satisfied with their claims for accounting for the frozen seniority, and the teachers continue to have more than six and a half years of recovery time.

“This cannot continue. If we do nothing, the next academic year will continue with deep injustice in public schools,” he defended at a meeting with journalists on the street next to the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra, where Carla Piedade, a representative of the trade union leadership, was present.

“In addition to the other inequities inherent in Dynamic Attachment (DAT), today we also have many colleagues who are connected through DAT but are still unemployed, indicating that they may soon be teaching in more than one school group at the same time, with confusion, fatigue and related costs,” he said.

André Pestana recalled that professors of “mobility due to illness continue to be deeply neglected, as are mono-teaching colleagues.” Also, operational assistants are “tired and exhausted.”

“Schools are getting fewer and fewer operational assistants, putting their physical and mental health at risk, as well as the safety of students,” warned the president of the board of STOP.

These professionals, he stressed, “are overwhelmed with additional work, and the wages are still meager, forcing them to look for a second job in order to maintain a decent life.”

“In the midst of this, they are pursuing a complex career rather than a specific career,” he said, calling for a five-day strike and demonstration in the capital on September 22.

For “Stop” it is important “once and for all to contact these professionals and solve their situation.”

“Schools also need more technical assistants, as well as higher and special education technicians, to properly support our children, especially children with special educational needs,” the union leader said, stressing that these workers “deserve decent wages and careers and have the right to be close to family.”

In his opinion, “all this devaluation of those who work in public schools” continues to occur, which leads “again, many thousands of students begin this school year without a teacher or with people leading classes without professional or pedagogical training”, which “endangers the quality of public schools and jeopardizes the present and future of children and youth.”

André Pestana called on teachers and other school workers to organize strike funds during competition week, September 18-22, which “has been seen in the past to be 100% legal.”

The Platform of Nine Teachers’ Unions has also scheduled a strike for October 6, after World Teachers’ Day the previous day.

From September 12, on the first day of classes, strikes will also be announced for overtime, overtime work and all types of activities included in the non-academic component of the institution.