“We are inflexible ... in the negotiation of an increase in salaries and pensions, and in the unfreezing of careers," Ana Avoila of the Frente Comum (Common Front) said at a news conference after she and her colleagues had delivered the demands to the Ministry of Finance in Lisbon.


Civil service unions had approved the proposals at a summit on Wednesday. As well as the headline 4% pay increase, they include a minimum monthly increase of €50, a 6.5% increase in lunch subsidies (currently €4.27), and a 4% rise in pensions.


The government, Avoila said, must now make a counter-proposal by 14 or 15 October, given that the 2017 state budget must be submitted to parliament on the latter day "and it makes no sense for us to be discussing matters with a budget that is already done".


The unions' priority “is the increase in salaries, the unfreezing of remunerative progression, the opening of [job] competitions and the 35 hours" as an upper limit for the work week". Public sector workers are this year seeing the restoration of the amounts cut from their salaries during Portugal's euro-zone bailout but, unions argue, they deserve more.


"Civil service workers have a right to annual salary increases and development in their careers, to offset the effect of the cuts and freezes that drastically reduced their income in the past few years," she told Lusa on Wednesday.