Portugal's biggest teachers' federation rejects a recruitment overhaul signed off mid-negotiation
Fenprof says the government announced approval of the new teacher recruitment rules while talks were still running. It is also still fighting the one-euro-per-exam-answer marking rate.
The National Federation of Teachers considers it unacceptable that the government announced approval of the new teacher recruitment model before negotiations had finished. That is the flashpoint right now, and it is not about what the decree says. It is about how it got there.
Fenprof’s objection is procedural, and it stands on its own. If a decree goes to union negotiation, the outcome of that negotiation has to be capable of changing something. Announcing approval halfway through hollows out the exercise and turns it into consultation wearing a different name. The federation had already judged the government’s final proposal inadequate and weighed up asking for supplementary talks.
Then there is the one-euro question
It runs alongside, and it is the one that has genuinely angered the profession. The payment model for exam markers sets one euro per answer graded, twelve euros per re-mark and ten euros per exam marked on paper, covering the first and second exam phases as well as the special session. The education minister wants the money in teachers’ accounts during August.
Fenprof calls it an affront. The reasoning is more than indignation: the number of answers a teacher can mark in an hour varies a great deal depending on the subject, the structure of the paper and the procedures required, which means the same euro buys very different amounts of work. On the federation’s arithmetic, some markers end up on the equivalent of six euros an hour, part of it worked on weekly rest days. The Left Bloc has already asked the government how it arrived at the figure of one euro.
None of this is only an August problem. Primary and secondary schools go back on 11 September, and the placement competitions are the machinery that decides whether every class has a teacher in front of it on day one. The recruitment rules have been rewritten by several governments in a row, always leaving the same thing unsolved: entire subject groups where posts go unfilled because nobody applies.
What happens next turns on two open questions — whether the government reopens the table after announcing approval, and whether markers are actually paid in August as the ministry promised. Neither is settled.
Image: Esquerda.net / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
