“We feel cornered, forgotten. As is the case with public health, ultimately these are all public services,” denounces Carolina Picasso, a 50-year-old French teacher and secondary school principal, who supported the strike called Thursday by the STEPV, CSIF, CC OO and UGT unions of Valencian non-university public education, the second organized this legislature against the educational policy of the PP Consell. “There are many reductions, some camouflaged. For example, the time needed to cover teachers’ vacations, which causes students to lose many hours of teaching,” adds Marc Peris, a 48-year-old drawing teacher. They demand an update of salaries, after years of salary freeze, fewer students per class (the ratio is now around 30 or 35 per class), more infrastructure, especially in the area affected by the dana, and that teaching in Valencian is no longer attacked.
The Ministry of Education has estimated, according to data from one hour in the afternoon, the follow-up of the teachers’ strike at 17.49% (18.36% in the province of Valencia, 17.81% in Alicante and 13.74% in Castellón), while the unions speak of 60%, although until they know the follow-up in the afternoon shifts they will not be able to offer a percentage definitive. According to the general director of Teaching Personnel, Pablo Ortega, data collected until two in the afternoon indicate that “12,605 teachers supported the strike, against 70,569 called.”
The spokesperson for STEPV (majority union), Marc Candela, urged the new Minister of Education, María del Carmen Ortí, to “sit down to negotiate, because teachers and the educational community are in the streets to demand just things and with full rights”. “We must react,” warned Candela, the Consell’s new head of Education, while emphasizing that if this is not the case, the mobilizations will continue.
The union leader regretted that, after requesting in writing a meeting with President Juanfran Pérez Llorca, and Ortí herself “did not receive a response” and this morning the advisor “did not receive” the strikers who gathered in front of the Education headquarters in Campanar and delegated to the General Director of Personnel. “We want to talk to the councilor, who is the one who has to solve this problem,” he noted. In any case, Candela hopes that Ortí is “more open to dialogue” than former councilor José Antonio Rovira and that he has “a different disposition”.
The trade union organizations demand that the new Valencian government opens a negotiation process to recover lost purchasing power, pays the extraordinary payments in full and includes a salary review clause linked to the CPI, as well as concludes a multi-year salary recovery agreement that places Valencian teachers at levels comparable to those in the rest of the state.
Public teachers insist on reducing student ratios per class to avoid work overload and allow the most individualized attention possible to students; restore the eliminated teaching staff, particularly in vocational training, official language schools and conservatories, and immediately fill all vacant positions and replacements, both for teaching staff and for educational care staff (PAE) and administrative and service staff (PAS).
Teachers’ protests during the strike day spread across the country. In addition to those organized in the three provincial capitals, they also took place in municipalities such as Elche, Dénia, Alcoi, Elda, Torrevieja, Orihuela, Sagunto, Alzira, Gandia, Xàtiva, Ontinyent and the Vall d’Uixó.
Teachers “have reached the limit”, declared Rubén Navas, of STEPV, during the demonstration organized in the morning in Alicante. The manager assured that the group had suffered, since 2010, a drop in purchasing power of more than 25%.
For Antonio Talavera, coordinator of public education at the UGT, Valencian has become a “persecuted” language and he denounced that the government of the Generalitat, since the mandate of President Carlos Mazón, now resigned, “has come to destroy it and eradicate it from the classrooms”.
In this sense, the teaching unions criticized last year’s call from the Generalitat of the PP for a consultation between families to choose the basic language in which their children should learn in schools and institutes, under the pretext that the previous Valencian government of Botànic (PSPV, Compromís and Unides Podem) imposed the use of their own language in teaching. 50.53% of families chose Valencian compared to 49.47% who preferred Spanish.
Precariousness and legislative reform
The Platform for the Defense of Quality Public Education, which forms the federation of parents’ associations and teachers’ unions, called for demonstrations in the afternoon in the three provincial capitals to support the strike and call on the educational community to join the teachers’ demands.
In its manifesto, the platform denounces the precarious conditions in which teachers work and the lack of resources to adequately care for students, while calling for legislative reform to guarantee the protection and promotion of Valencian in educational centers.
The Platform underlines that in addition to recovering the 121 million euros cut from infrastructure, it is urgent to rehabilitate the centers affected by the damage, many of them remain in terrible conditions, and announces new mobilizations if the Ministry of Education and the new Valencian government “do not take immediate measures”.
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