Over forty school assemblies from the Bages region mobilized in Manresa to express their profound dissatisfaction. The action, part of an ongoing series of protests, took place during the visit of the Presidency Minister of the Generalitat, Albert Dalmau, aiming to pressure the Government to improve teachers' working conditions and increase investment in public education.
Despite Minister Dalmau's initial reluctance to meet with union organizations, a meeting eventually occurred last Thursday. Teachers view this meeting as a direct result of their successful mobilizations, even as the Government insists that its offer has reached its limit. The collective accuses the Generalitat of employing a "divide and conquer" strategy, prioritizing agreements made outside the official sectoral table with organizations that supported the budget, which they interpret as a political quid pro quo.
Key grievances of the education sector include chronic underinvestment, with Catalonia allocating only 17% of its budget to Education, significantly below most other autonomous communities. They also criticize the Government's "fallacious salary propaganda," which, they claim, conceals the loss of purchasing power for Catalan teachers. Furthermore, they deem it "hypocritical" for the Government to now rely on the sectoral table as the sole legitimate forum, after having previously agreed to insufficient improvements externally.
“"We will not stop the mobilizations; instead, we will increase their intensity, as the sector has already strongly expressed its opinion on the agreement."
Facing the executive's immobility, educational centers are escalating pressure. Over 480 schools have already announced the suspension of trips and camps if negotiations do not advance, and new school assemblies are forming across the territory to intensify the conflict. Teacher representatives assert that the issue is not a lack of budget, but a lack of political will from the Department of Education.
