More than 20 000 teachers took part in the warning strike in Hungary

Less than 20 percent of the country’s teachers participated in a warning strike called by trade unions for Monday morning, the human resources ministry told MTI.

The two-hour strike was held to call for higher wages and reduced workload.

The ministry called it “regrettable” that the trade unions had gone ahead with their strike plans despite the “absence of legal conditions”. It argued that the strike action had been based on a non-binding court ruling rather than a ruling that was already in force.

The ministry on Saturday told unions that the strike would be illegal as the Jan. 28 court ruling on the matter was not final. It is only lawful to hold a strike in Hungary in possession of a final court ruling on the matter.

Representatives of the teachers’ unions PDSZ and PSZ told a joint press conference on Monday that preliminary data showed participation by over 20,000 teachers in the strike which they called “a feast of democracy in Hungarian education”.

“We can be proud of our teachers who set an example”, they said, adding that “no matter how immense the pressure by the government was to thwart this strike it still went ahead”.

Zsuzsa Szabo, the chair of PSZ, said that those who participated in the strike called attention to the serious problem of many teachers leaving their profession. “If this trend continues there will soon be nobody in schools to teach our children who then will have no future, as much as this society will have no future either,” she said.

Erzsebet Nagy, an official of PDSZ, said the government had “exerted unprecedented pressure on teachers and parents as well” during the strike.

“There were schools where whole delegations of education supervisors appeared to threaten those participating in the strike and attempted to persuade teachers to return to their classes”, she said.

Commenting on the human resources ministry’s calling the strike illegal, Nagy said the government had not submitted any appeal against the non-binding ruling until 10am, the end of today’s strike. “This strike went to show not only the original reasons but the way the right to strike and democracy stand today in Hungary”, said Nagy.

PDSZ and PSZ called the strike in October. The unions’ want the benchmark for calculating teachers’ salaries to be the current minimum wage. At present, salaries are linked to the minimum wage in 2014. They are also calling for an increase in the salaries of people working in education who aren’t teachers. They also want the number of hours of classroom instruction to be capped at 22 a week, and they want teaching assistants’ hours reduced from a weekly 40 to 35.

• read also: Would you teach for 865 EUR/month gross wage? Hungarians go on strike

Szabo said that the unions planned a general strike for March 16 if no agreement is reached on their demands with the government.

Early in the afternoon, a convoy of some 200 vehicles held a demonstration in downtown Budapest, in support of the strike. The demonstration organised by the trade union umbrella organisation SZEF started from Heroes’ Square and crossed over to the Buda side of the city before returning to the starting point.

The demonstration had no police escort, despite the organisers’ request.

In a statement ahead of the demonstration, SZEF told MTI that the demonstration was organised to express solidarity with the teachers, and also to raise awareness of “failing wage negotiations” in other sectors too.

Ruling Fidesz said in a statement that the strike was “a campaign event organised by the leftist parties”. “Leftist parties, which stripped teachers of a month’s pay and closed hundreds of schools, fired thousands of teachers and had them work for humiliatingly low wages [when they were on power before 2010], are now exploiting teachers and riling them up,” the statement said.

Read alsoStudent satisfaction in Hungary higher than EU average