CCOO and UGT sign an agreement with Education that USTEC rejects as insufficient
This Thursday morning, the Department of Education, led by Minister Anna Simó, reached an agreement with the CCOO and UGT unions to reverse the cuts that were applied to teachers in 2010. Both the Minister and the unions that have signed the pact have celebrated that it is a historic advance, but from USTEC, the union with the most representation in the Sectoral Table where the pact has taken place, they have shown their rejection of all the points of the agreement, since they consider it insufficient: “Today’s signature responds to an ultimatum from the administration and to a negotiation made on the sidelines of the union unit with CCOO and UGT, which only represent 20% of the non-university teaching staff of Catalonia”. This is what USTEC’s national spokesperson, Iolanda Segura, explained in statements to this medium, adding that the points raised by the union were not included in the document presented at today’s meeting.
A pact that does not reverse the cuts, according to USTEC
The aim of the signed agreement was to recover the working and salary conditions of the teachers who were affected by the cuts in 2010, but from the majority education union they claim that the pact reached by the ministry with CCOO and UGT “is not a reversal agreement”: “The government is breaking the commitment to reverse all the cuts during this legislature”, they point out in a joint statement with the Intersyndical, ASPEPC, the CGT and FEUSOC, referring to the point of the reduction of two teaching hours for teachers over 55, which the agreement postpones as a goal for the next legislature. The agreement also provides for the equalization of the salaries of technical vocational teachers with the rest of the teachers. For USTEC, this point leaves out an important part of the collective, especially the interims.
The condition of budgets
Another point that generates discontent in USTEC, as Segura argues, is the condition of the agreement on the approval of the budgets of the Generalitat for 2024, since, if the negotiations are not unblocked, the points agreed to recover the cuts cannot be applied. “There is no political will”, maintains the spokeswoman, who believes that without the approved accounts everything will remain in words. For this reason, and due to the lack of problems to deal with, such as the reduction of classroom ratios, USTEC has decided to completely distance itself from the pact with Education.