Following Friday’s warning strike, the Lithuanian Education Employees’ Trade Union (LŠDPS) is sticking to plans to organise a long-term strike and a teachers’ march in late September.
“We are preparing,” Andrius Navickas, the union’s leader, told BNS. “We saw that efforts to talk and negotiate with fail.”
The union on Thursday applied for permission to organise pickets lasting about a month in front of the Education, Science and Sport Ministry’s building and in the square outside the parliament building.
“We are asking for [permission to stage pickets] from the morning of September 29 to October 28,” Navickas said. “Teachers who would go on strike would not work for a month.”
Tents would be set up at the teachers’ gathering point and activities would be organised, according to Navickas.
Teachers working in Vilnius would gather in front of the parliament or the ministry building on September 29, and those living further away would march to the capital to join their colleagues, according to Navickas.
The LŠDPS plans to hold the next round of negotiations with the ministry on Tuesday.
In Navickas' words, the union is ready to continue the talks up to the planned strike date and to call off the strike if a deal is reached by then.
The union is demanding, among other things, a 20 percent increase in teachers’ pay from September and a further 30 percent rise from January, along with a reduction in class sizes.
Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė said that teachers’ salaries will be raised to 130 percent of the average wage next year, as stated in the political parties’ agreement, and that it will be done in two stages – from January and September.
According to her, some of the union’s demands are impossible to meet.
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