The Latvian Education and Science Employees’ Union (LIZDA) will meet with Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņas (JV) today at 3:30 p.m. to discuss the resignation request of Education and Science Minister Anda Čakša (JV) expressed by the teachers’ union, LIZDA informed the LETA agency.
Taking into account that Čakša rejected LIZDA’s demand to resign, the trade union turned to Kariņš on Tuesday, demanding “urgent solutions for fulfilling the teachers’ strike agreement”.
The head of the teachers’ union, Inga Vanaga, told the LETA agency that the minister’s decision not to resign “was predictable” and was “a matter of attitude”. LIZDA criticizes that during the two months since the pedagogues’ strike, Čakša has not provided correct calculations and amendments to legal acts on the procedures for financing the work of pedagogues.
This is a frivolous attitude towards teachers, according to Vanaga, who says that municipalities should now know what funding they will have available and what salaries to offer new teachers.
According to Vanga, LIZDA, with its actions, wants to ensure that the teachers’ strike agreements are fulfilled in full. LIZDA hopes that during this week it will be possible to reach an agreement with the government on meeting the demands of the teachers’ strike, otherwise an emergency meeting of the trade union council will be called to decide on the future course of action.
On June 30, LIZDA decided to demand Chaksha’s resignation, as they believe that the request of the trade union to accept amendments to all the necessary regulations of the Cabinet of Ministers (MK) on the funding procedure for educators has not been fulfilled, nor has an agreement been reached regarding balancing the workload of educators in the following years.
As the reasons for the request for Chaksha’s resignation, the trade union also cites “offering ill-considered solutions and making hasty decisions” regarding the optimization of school networks and the redistribution of funding to the Ministry of Health, as well as the “unprofessional, late and erroneous” conduct of centralized exams and the announcement of results, which “has created chaos in education in institutions, despair in pedagogues, confusion and ignorance about the possibilities of continuing education in children and parents”, says the resignation request.
Čakša has announced that she is not going to resign, because both of the specific strike demands mentioned in LIZDA’s strike application – the adoption of the lowest salary increase schedule and the start of load balancing – have been fulfilled. After LIZDA’s announcement, Kariņš also did not advocate for Čakša’s resignation, instead pointing out the problems of education quality, which educators should work on solving together with the ministry.
2023-07-06 05:11:33
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