Prague, April 25 (CTK) – The Czech education sector employees’ trade union has launched a campaign entitled The End of Cheap Teachers which follows up their demand for at least a 10-percent pay rise in 2017, Frantisek Dobsik, head of the trade union, told reporters yesterday.
The unionists do not plan any particular protest events as yet, they will first wait for the results of negotiations with the government.
The salaries of teachers and other school employees were rising more slowly than in other sectors last year.
While the wages in the public sector rose by 3.5 percent to 26,787 crowns on average, in the education sector, they increased by 2.2 percent to only 23,579 crowns.
Though the base pay of school employees increased, their bonuses dropped because the financial means the schools received from the state did not cover a rise in the number of employees in relation to a rising number of students.
A teacher’s average pay was 26,987 crowns, other school employees who were not graduates from education faculties (some 60,000) earned 15,188 crowns a month.
Apart from the means for salaries, the unions must also monitor the provision of sufficient finances for the school sector as such, Dobsik said.
If the school unions succeeded in pushing through a 10-percent pay rise, the average gross monthly salary of a teacher would rise to 29,686 crowns.
The final goal of the school trade union is to reach 130 percent of the average gross pay in the Czech Republic, which would be 34,407 crowns now.
There are more than 153,000 teachers at nursery, primary and secondary shools and at conservatories in the Czech Republic with a population of 10.5 million, according to the Education Ministry’s statistics.
Czech teachers’ salaries have long been below the average of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.
According to the latest OECD statistics from 2013, the average gross monthly pay of Czech teachers at primary schools was some 34,850 crowns a month and a secondary school teacher earned 37,400 crowns on average.
The average of the 24 assessed OECD countries was from 67,000 to 77,500 crowns a month.
Out of the neighbouring countries (Germany, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia), German teachers enjoyed the highest salaries and only Slovak teachers had lower wages than their Czech counterparts.
($1=24.014 crowns)
