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Dumitru Ivanov: We never received salary increases without protest actions
Members of the Confederal Committee of the National Trade Union Confederation of Moldova (CNSM) had on Monday, January 16, a meeting with Prime Minister Pavel Filip and a group of ministers. The parties discussed the socio-economic challenges in the country, focusing on claims of trade unionists in education that will picket, starting tomorrow, January 17, at 10.00, the headquarter of Government.
Oleg Budza, president of CNSM, said that the economic growth forecasts for 2017 made by international financial institutions for our country, inspires optimism, but this growth must be felt by each citizen, by increases in salaries, pensions and social allowances.
In this sense, the trade union leader reiterated the need to increase the minimum salary to the subsistence level and a further establishing its worth to 50-60 percent of the average wage, increase salary rate for category I of the Unique Tariff Network, development and adoption of a new Law on salaries in the public sector providing all incentive payments and compensation, and increase public sector wages. All these measures should lead to increased work motivation, consider Budza.
Pavel Filip expressed willingness to start negotiations, noting that in this purpose will be created a joint working group that will examine and identify opportunities for resolving trade unionists requirements, whether they will come or not to the scheduled protests.
“Protest is a form of expression, which draws attention to some problems. I assure you that this problem is already with the Government and we try to find solution, some of the claims have already been agreed. For this, however, we need your support, together to do an analysis to see what we have in the system, what are the possibilities and costs. We can overcome the existing problems only through dialogue,” said Philip.
In turn, Dumitru Ivanov, president of the Education and Science Trade Union Federation (FSEŞ), stressed that since Moldova’s independence, no salary increase for education branch was achieved without protests. “It is not ambition, but we see no other way out. You have to understand that people cannot live like this,” said the FSEŞ leader.
In turn, Sergiu Sainciuc, vice president of CNSM, drew attention to the need to speed up approval of decisions by the Government, which would allow increasing the amount of scholarships since 1st of January 2017, reducing teaching workload for young professionals in the first three years of activity to 75 percent according to a salary increase of 50 percent and a single allowance paid to young specialists in the branch of education to job placement, these being 3 of the 6 claims submitted by trade unionists in education.
We remind that the decision to organize and conduct protests was taken by FSEŞ General Council, at its meeting on January 12, the main demand is the increase by 50% of the salary of teachers.
Department of mass media and international relations
