Teachers to hold strike on April 15, April 20

Budapest, April 6 (MTI) – Plans for two hours of civil disobediance and a warning strike are under way for April 15 as well as for a full-day nationwide teachers’ strike on April 20, the organisers said on Wednesday.

László Miklósi, head of the association of history teachers and of the Civil Platform for Public Education (CPK), told a press conference that the various unions agreed at a Wednesday meeting to cooperate “in the interest of public education”. Members of the teachers’s strike committee, namely the Teachers’ Union PSZ, the Union of Education Leaders and the Union of Hungarian Public Education and Training, met with representatives of the Democratic Union of Teachers (PDSZ), the Tanitanek (I want to teach) movement and the CPK, Miklósi said.

The CPK will also hold talks with a government delegation on proposals to improve public education in Hungary on April 12, he added.

László Mendrey, the head of the PDSZ, told MTI that there is no decision as yet as to whether the civil disobediance and strike would coincide. The former was proposed by the Tanitanek movement and the latter by the PDSZ. He said his own opinion was that the two events should be held simultaneously. He said the unions want to cooperate fully to draw as many people as possible.

The full-day strike was called by the teachers’s strike committee after talks with the government failed, Piroska Galló, the head of the PSZ union, said earlier. Galló said Monday’s talks failed to result in an agreement on the reduction of the number of teachers’ compulsory classroom hours and their administrative burdens, wage increases, free choice of textbooks as well as reducing the burden on students.

László Palkovics, the state secretary for education, told Inforadio on Wednesday that a working group is looking into plans to reduce the workload on students from September this year. He said however that changes would not affect physical education classes, which are mandatory to be held every day.

Photo: MTI

Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters