Problems arising from the repositioning in the career ranks of some teachers that are resulting in less senior teachers overtaking other more senior ones, were the main reason Fenprof cited in seeking a meeting on Tuesday with the deputy Justice Ombudsman.
But it was the full counting of service time frozen in recent years – the running sore in the relationship between teachers and government for more than a year now that prompted the union to issue the warning.
In comments to journalists after the meeting with the Deputy Ombudsman, Fenprof’s secretary-general, Mário Nogueira, recalled the “haste” with which the Ministry of Education had scheduled for December 2018 talks to meet rules laid down in the 2019 state budget that foresaw the resumption of negotiations on the counting of service time, but only in 2019.
“For someone who was in such a hurry before 2019 had even started … it seems not to want to solve the matter,” said Nogueira. “Let us be coherent and restore that tranquility that schools will have to have for this school year, otherwise we will have a miserable year and we wanted to see if we could avoid that. But if it must be, it will be.”
Teachers have been called out on Thursday to press for an immediate return to talks, with a protest scheduled first in front of the Ministry of Education and then to the Cabinet Office, “having no truck with strategies of political opportunism”.
Last week the Minister, Tiago Brandão Rodrigues, said in Parliament that the negotiations would be convened in good time, responding to the unions’ demands for an early meeting with “a reminder” that the budget is valid all year and that the government has its own timetable to implement it comments that did not please teachers, or some parliamentary groups, such as the Communist Party, which forms part of the minority Socialist government’s power base.
On Tuesday, Fenprof sought in what it called an “extremely useful meeting” with the deputy Ombudsman to clarify that the problems of less senior teachers overtaking more senior ones following the repositioning in their careers had nothing to do with the fact that the counting of frozen service time is still an unresolved issue, but rather the effects of transitional measures provided for in revisions to teachers’ career statute in 2007 and 2009.
These transitional measures have meant that teachers who started their careers after they took effect – after which career steps are normally to last four years instead of five – have seen them ranked one or sometimes two ranks above colleagues with the same amount of service.
According to Fenprof’s calculations some 10,000 teachers so repositioned have overtaken some 55,000 colleagues in this way.
“There is only one solution, which is the positioning of those who were already in the career in a situation similar to those of the repositioned”, said Nogueira.