Teachers want to regain one month of salary taken away by the previous cabinet when it abolished the 13th-month salary, Democratic Union of Teachers president Gábor Kerpen said in a Monday statement.
This represents 18% of teachers’ salaries, he said, adding that the cabinet should lay aside about Ft 30 billion.
In addition, he declared “we expect a 25% pay rise in this term of office”.
Kerpen said Ft 100 billion that the previous government had taken out of the sector should be channelled back into education.
Kerpen welcomed changes to public education rules in recent months, saying they point in the direction of professional efficiency.
Am I missing a trick here? How can a 13th month
salary equate to 18% of salary. Shouldn’t it really
be closer to 8%?
It’s just a crappy soundbite. He’s probably taken the monthly gross amount and worked it out as a percentage of the annual net amount or something. Public sector union leaders drive me up the wall with their sense of entitlement. “We expect a 25% pay rise in the next four years”. Oh do you now?
Maybe I’ll just write to my HR manager and tell her the same thing. She’d laugh her arse off.
TDS – But the standard (state) monthly salary for a full time school teacher (or university assistant professor for that matter) is approx NET 110 000 HUF (385 EUR).
So the demand does not seem unreasonable.
Tanar,
I agree that teachers should get paid more, but then lots of people should get paid more. Where is all that money going to come from? If the teachers get a huge raise, all the other government workers will expect similar treatment, and Hungary will go into even further debt, or there will be economy-damaging strikes. Until people are willing to pay more in taxes or the economy improves, public employees will not be able to get more money.
SzabadMan,
I’m sure you are right that ‘giving in’ to teachers would mean that other public sector workers would also demand rises.
But I’m not so sure that a lot of the money couldn’t be found through increases in efficiency and decreases in bureaucracy rather than tax increases.
There seem to be so many areas where improvements could be made. At my Uni, they would include rewarding good employees through efficient performance appraisal (and getting rid of hangers-on), large cost savings through simple energy efficiency measures, cutting down on paperwork through introducing better electronic systems, slimming down layers of management, etc.
These are fairly simple structural and procedural changes, but the state sector – again, only using the experience from my Uni – seems to be really resistant to change and suffering from a serious lack of effective leadership. So there is money at the Uni but it is not spent very ‘effectively’.
Tanar,
I’m sure you’re right, but the same unions that demand more money for teachers would fight just as hard to keep those “hangers-on” from getting the sack. Plus, you talk about incentive pay for quality people and investing in energy efficiency and electronic systems; where is the money going to come from for those things? If they give the money to the teachers, regardless of whether those teachers are doing a better job then they were before, then they certainly can’t invest in those worthwhile things you were talking about. I’d say that everyone will have to do with less, because there’s just less money available. That, unfortunately, includes teachers. When they economy recovers, I’m sure they’ll all get raises. What they should get is incentive pay based on objective measures of ability. I guess I’m just a dreamer.
I agree with Tanar that teachers are chronically underpaid, but also accept Free Man’s view that others too are underpaid. The difference is that we should be investing in our teachers and divesting ourselves of the second, third and fourth etc. public sector employees who help the first employee execute his/her one-man/woman job.
Yes, the whole ‘pot’ is smaller, Szabadman that’s true. Perhaps it would be useful if the government could give soft loans to these places in order for them to make the necessary efficiency improvements – but it’s a hellish job getting hold of this kind of money, even when it’s nominally available – bureaucracy. I know this from personal experience of applying for domestic efficiency improvement loans from the HUN government.
Domian agrees about getting rid of ‘useless’ public sector employees, but if these people then remain unemployed, they just add to the social benefits bill for the taxpayer. So new jobs have to be created, along with re-training, investment in innovation and technology, etc. etc. Gotta look at the whole system. The last thing Bp needs is more homeless people.
I personally think that Hungary could go for a ‘sustainability’ drive – that would mop up some unemployed and bring loads of other side benefits – social as well as material. I mean refitting old buildings with energy efficient materials, improving public transport and bike lanes, installing green roofs, rain collectors and solar panels, creating more ‘green’ landscape (look at how successful Gödör is, for example – a happy outcome of a planning disaster, if there ever was one), etc.
field, so I’m probably biased.
But then that’s my (teaching