Roughly 10,000 education employees, on the twelfth day of the strike, protested again, on Friday, in front of the Government, from where they marched to the Cotroceni Palace.
The rally – for which the unions expect 20,000 people – takes place a day after the Executive adopted a “declaration” by which it is committed that the future salary law will start from the principle that the basic salary of the beginning teacher will be established at the level of the average gross salary in the economy.
However, the unions demand that this “guarantee” be provided in a normative act, and not in a document without legal value, saying that only in this way will the strike be stopped.
Protesters shouted “Resignation”, or “How dare you?”, referring to statements made on June 1 by President Klaus Iohannis about teachers on strike: “How dare anyone jeopardize national exams?”.
All the attempts of the Government, in the last 3 weeks, to extinguish the protest have failed. For more than an hour, the prime minister has been face to face with the trade unionists from Education, at a new round of negotiations.
“We have been humiliated continuously for 3 weeks and still the Government ignores us. We are not to blame. We are humiliated with wages of an unskilled worker“, said one protester- “Do you think you can live with 20 million? I would ask Mr. Iohannis: could he live with 4 million lei and pay it off in 3 years? Well, I’ll be eating in 3 years from now?“, said another one.
The president of the “Spiru Haret” Federation of Education Unions, Marius Nistor, told Digi24 on Friday that “the time for compromises has passed” and that there is no chance that the strike will end today. The teachers’ representatives will go to a meeting at the Government at 12:00 where they will demand “the full application of the respective grid and an appropriate financing of the Education system”.
“The teachers’ answer (regarding the Memorandum adopted by the Government on Thursday – ed.) is very firm. I don’t believe in promises, agreements, memoranda. In fact, in Romania you can no longer even believe that a law can be implemented. At the moment, they very clearly want all salary claims to be quickly implemented through a normative act and not in the future, but now”, Nistor said.