The teachers’ caravan that will travel along the National Road (EN) 2 for a week starts today from Chaves, in an initiative organized by the union platform to demand the recuperation of service time.
“For six and a half days, the various union organizations will take to the whole country, through EN2, the problems of the public school and the teaching profession that the Government intends not to solve, or at least not even to talk about,” explained the National Teachers Federation (Fenprof) last week.
The initiative comes from a platform that brings together nine union organizations from the education sector, of which Fenprof is a member.
Arriving in Faro on May 30th, the “caravan along the EN2”, as the teachers call it, will include five to six stops a day, with actions with teachers, meetings with students, parents and the population in general, and plenary meetings.
According to Manuel Nobre, from Fenprof’s Zona Sul union, the route across the country seeks “to correspond, in a way, to the six and a half years of service time that teachers have worked, but that the Government doesn’t want to consider.
The full recovery of the time of service (six years, six months and 23 days) is one of the main demands of the unions, which have already offered to negotiate with the Ministry of Education a solution to recover this time of service in a phased manner.
The platform of union organizations has already scheduled a national strike and two large demonstrations for June 6th, in Porto and Lisbon, a date that the general secretary of Fenprof, Mário Nogueira, anticipates will become historic, either by the large mobilization of teachers or by finally reaching an agreement with the government.
If the agreement does not happen, a strike is also on the table for the final evaluations, which will start on June 16 for 9th grade and on June 19 for high school students.
In addition to Fenprof, the National Federation of Education platform includes the Union Association of Licensed Teachers, the Pro-Order of Teachers, the Union of Educators and Licensed Teachers, the National Union of Education Professionals, the National and Democratic Teachers Union, the Independent Union of Teachers and Educators, and the National Union of Polytechnic and University Graduated Teachers.