The strike, called by the Union of All Education Professionals (S.TO.P), will take place this Thursday and Friday. For the union, this is an “unprecedented way” for teachers from Portuguese Schools Abroad to unite in protest.
According to S.TO.P, after teachers from the Portuguese School of Luanda “held a five-day strike with high participation in the last week of February, the struggle is now expanding to more schools together, revealing that the problems are widespread in these schools”.
The issue is the fact that contracted teachers and those on staff at Portuguese Schools Abroad in the public network (EPERP) of the Portuguese Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation (MECI) - despite having finally obtained permanent status - face “working conditions that are inferior to those of their colleagues in Portugal and their school colleagues who are on statutory mobility”, says the union.
S.TO.P stresses that the cost of living in these countries is very high, that access to healthcare is difficult and that supporting families is complex and costly, arguing that the teachers who will now go on strike are, “in practice, fighting to ensure that the future of teachers in these schools is not precarious”.
And it stresses that teachers have sometimes had to rely on the efforts of the schools’ management to bridge the salary gap, the lack of a subsidy to support the cost of living and the costs of raising their children, unlike what is guaranteed by law, in a fair manner, to colleagues on mobility in the same schools.
