Skopje, 30 August 2023 (MIA) — As the Independent Union for Education and Science NSON is signing up new members to support its announced strike over pay and collective agreement violations, the Education, Science and Culture Workers Union SONK and the Ministry of Education and Science are against a teachers' strike in September.

According to Independent Union for Education and Science leader Tomislav Gievski, they are consolidating their membership to have enough people to stage a strike. He said staging a strike required that at least twenty percent of each school's employees be NSON members.

"Not only are we thinking about a strike, but if we hit this number, there will 100 percent be a strike," Gievski said.

"We don't get paid until after the 10th of each month and we get paid much less than we should be," he said, adding that even with the 10 percent raises the state had promised education workers as of September, school workers' paychecks would remain below the national average salary.

Asked if the Minister of Education and Science was aware of their requests, Gievski said NSON representatives had met with Jeton Shaqiri about two and a half months ago and the minister told them at the time he would notify them in writing after talking with the legal department.

"We didn't get an answer, though we had been told we would get it in a week. Now we are being told he is on vacation," the union leader said.

Education, Science and Culture Workers Union leader Jakim Nedelkov, on the other hand, said he did not think the other union's demands warranted a strike but they could be met through negotiations instead.

Nedelkov said that SONK had been negotiating with the Ministry of Education to increase teachers' salaries even more than the announced 10 percent. Their raises would be certainly higher than 10 percent, he stressed, but the exact percentage was still being discussed.

Regarding NSON's demands, he said "SONK will support everything that is constructive and holds water," but noted that the other union had "misinterpreted provisions of the collective agreement" in claiming they were being violated. He also said a new and better collective agreement for primary and secondary education was in the works.

Asked about the teachers' low pay that NSON cited as the main reason for its strike, Nedelkov said he "could not sing praises to the government for doing much for education workers" but SONK, nevertheless, had negotiated a 10 percent raise in 2020, 18 percent in 2022, and another increase this year that he said would be higher than 10 percent.

"It is a fact there is inflation, the prices are high and salaries are below average," the SONK leader said, adding that the union was doing what it could. "It is not enough, but are we as a union to blame that wages have been low since time immemorial? We cannot correct this injustice all of a sudden."  

In response to MIA's question for comment on the strike announced by one of the teachers' unions, the Ministry of Education and Science said that "students worrying again about their education being disrupted is what we need the least at the moment," considering the disruptions of the process at the beginning of the pandemic and during the teachers' strike in 2022. mr/