Teachers protest against low wages

The demands include a nine-percent raise on existing wages from 2016. Salaries have been frozen in the sector since September 2012, with the highest gross monthly wage currently set at PLN 3,109.

Solidarity union members are also fighting for the right to take retirement not on the basis of age, but the number of years worked in the profession.

Organisers have informed that around 7,000 teachers are taking part in the protest outside Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz’s office in the capital.

“[Kopacz] didn’t want to engage in dialogue with us, so we ahev come to her, to Warsaw,” said Solidarity head Piotr Duda, who also raised voices against Education Minister Joanna Kluzik Rostkowska’s plans to scrap the Teachers’ Charter, a bill originally passed in the 1970s which affords teachers a number of privileges.

A petition was handed to Minister Kluzik-Rostkowska, who ventured outside the cabinet office with her deputy Tadeusz Sławecki to meet the protestors.

Responding to union calls for a further budget injection of PLN 3 billion, Kluzik-Rostkowska defended her idea to dispose of the Charter and asked protestors if they had felt the additional PLN 15 billion which had been spent on the education system over the past decade.

The unionists said “no”.

Since the beginning of March, Minister Kluzik-Rostkowska has repeatedly underlined that budget outgoings on education have risen over the past decade to reach PLN 40 billion in 2014, while at the same time the number of pupils has dropped by 23 percent and the number of teachers has also shrunk by 11 percent. (jb)

Source: PAP