ZAGREB, October 17, 2019 – Primary and secondary school teachers and staff will be on strike across Croatia on Monday, union leaders announced at a press conference in Zagreb on Thursday.
The leader of the secondary school teachers’ union, Branimir Mihalinec, and the leader of the primary school teachers’ union, Sanja Šprem, said that the strike would continue until they were invited by the government to discuss their demand for higher job complexity indices.
The strike and protests are a message to the government that the statement by Prime Minister Andrej Plenković about the government’s plan to increase base pay for state administration and public sector employees does not mean that teachers’ demands have been met, Mihalinec said.
He added that higher job complexity indices was no longer just a union demand, but a demand by all employees in the primary and secondary education sector.
Šprem said she took the PM’s statement in Parliament to mean that there was money for pay rises for everyone except for teachers.
Commenting on the government’s announcement that base pay for all state administration and public sector workers would be increased by 6.12 percent, the union leaders said they were glad that everyone would get a pay rise, but that the move did not resolve their demands.
They said that they had concluded from their dialogue with Education Minister Blaženka Divjak that the job complexity indices were not fair, that this problem had to be dealt with immediately and that the unions’ demands had not been met.
Primary and secondary schools in Primorje-Gorski Kotar, Slavonski Brod-Posavina, Požega-Slavonia and Lika-Senj counties will be on strike on Friday.
More news about the strike can be found in the Lifestyle section.
