Denmark: Lockout threat overshadows social dialogue | WPN World People News

EI has supported the school trade union representatives’ meeting organised by its Danish affiliate, the Danish Union of Teachers (DLF). The meeting on 5 March in Odense was aimed at protesting against the Government taking the teachers’ planning time.

A total of 2,200 shop stewards and representatives of local DLF branches joined together at the meeting. It was only the third time since its foundation in 1874 that so many DLF branch representatives and teacher unionists were gathered together.

Threatened lockout

“Danish teachers are ready to fight,” said DLF President Anders Bondo Christensen. “So far, the negotiations between DLF and the employers’ organisation for a new work-time agreement have failed. On 4 March, the parties met for the first time inside the Conciliation Institution. If they don’t reach a solution there either, the municipalities will lock out teachers and, therefore, close Denmark’s public schools.”

Bondo Christensen could not go into details about the negotiations about the threatened lockout of 52,000 teachers, but called participants to prepare themselves for an industrial conflict. He told them that DLF will not accept a 37-hour working week without time for teaching preparation.

“The employers have presented us with a work-time model without any limitations,” Anders Bondo Christensen said. “Nobody would benefit from that, not even the employers, as it would only result in highly demotivated teachers.”

If the employers succeed in their action, public schools will be led 30 years backwards, DLF fears. The quality of education and the teachers’ engagement will disappear.

Preparation time cut

In Denmark, employers and the government want to remove all work-time agreements in the education sector. Agreements currently guarantee reasonable time for teaching preparation and reasonable working conditions. Also, agreements prevent employees’ discretionary treatment. The employers want to cancel all agreements with the teachers’ unions so that the rules for working time, e.g. the number of weekly class lessons, will be defined by the school leaders. This way, the teacher unions’ opportunity to negotiate work-time rules for their members and ensure quality education is undermined.

International solidarity

EI Deputy General Secretary David Edwards delivered a message of international solidarity towards Danish colleagues.

“Worldwide, the public sector is under assault from a confluence of opportunists, profiteers and political factions who have successfully framed their savagery as emergency assistance, their insatiable appetite for expanded market share as social responsibility, and their biased opinions as hard facts,” he said.

“There is a common thread in the responses to the debt crisis of most OECD member states. Whether governed by the left, the centre or the right, policies focus on austerity, on cutting back public expenditures, including education budgets. Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy are forced to pursue horrendous austerity measures in exchange for loans from richer EU countries. In the United States, we expect more than 100,000 teachers to be laid off.”

Reasserting that public authorities have a duty to ensure quality education for all, Edwards said that EI’s Executive Board has laid out its intention to mobilise globally for quality education. EI is also designing a whole year of activities and events that will culminate in a world day of action around World Teachers’ Day, on 5 October.

Fight goes on globally

“Today you are taking a stand,” Edwards stated. “You have heard the stories of burnt-out teachers with declining status fighting to have a single hour of preparation time a week. They and their students are the victims of a relentless attack that frames teachers as instruction deliverers and learning as testing. Yet highly effective and equitable national education systems talk about teacher leadership, teacher learning and teacher scholarship… and they talk about them not in empty platitudes but in their everyday dialogues, respectfully with teachers.

He went on to say that EI and its 30 million teachers worldwide stand in solidarity with their Danish colleagues. ”We are fighting defensively and offensively for the future of public education and we are fighting it in legislative battles, in the media, on the streets and in the classrooms. As soon as we get victories, we do what teachers do: we share, we organise, we reinvent and we get our ideas through… We always get through. And you will too.”

Public school lockout

On 27 February, employers unilaterally declared that negotiations failed and their organisation has given a lockout notice to all teachers employed on a collective agreement (some 50,000 teachers of the public primary and lower secondary school (“folkeskole”). If the parties cannot reach an agreement through the intervention of a mediator within three weeks, an industrial action will be organised and all “folkeskoles” be without teachers.

Source: Education International