Next Wednesday, June 15, the 24-hour national education strike will be held to demand “salary recovery and creation of positions, a budget of 6+1% of GDP for ANEP, UDELAR and UTEC, and against union persecution.”
Initially, the government handled the possibility of decreeing the essential so that the children who need it do not miss a day of food.
As a result of this, the president of the PIT-CNT, Marcelo Abdala, stated that it is hypocrisy and an anti-union measure that the food service in schools be decreed essential, because children must be provided with food every day of the year, Also Sundays and holidays.
For his part, the Minister of National Defense, Javier García, made the personnel of the Armed Forces available to take charge of the school canteens during the strike.
Subsequently, the FUM-TEP announced that it will distribute food to public school students that do not have an enabled dining room, due to the national strike on Wednesday, June 15.
“We understand that it is essential to attend to an emergency system for the distribution of food by territorial headquarters on the day of the strike,” the union said in a statement.
He stated: “Uruguay is going through an economic crisis where the most vulnerable sectors are the disadvantaged, poverty continues to increase and many children are only receiving school meals. We are at a time when poverty is advancing and children and adolescents are suffering from hunger”.
The union claimed the right to strike, and assured that “it is the responsibility of the State to guarantee the right to food.”
“Food spending and its execution in 2020 indicates a cut in food of 200 million pesos, and the absence of public balances on what happened in 2021 makes us think that the execution of the Primary Tax in the food category has continued descending”, questions the FUM-TEP.
Likewise, the union denounced, among other things, that the items are insufficient and were not adjusted for the CPI (31.54 pesos per day per child), there is a lack of personnel to attend to the school canteens, there are delays in the items to guarantee the payment to suppliers of the dining rooms, and reject the removal of food tickets that were given during the health emergency.
sanity prevailed
In the last few hours, the secretary of the Presidency, Álvaro Delgado, valued the decision of the teachers’ union to carry out a union guard in school cafeterias on the day of the national education strike, for which it will be without effect to declare the essentiality of the food service.
“We were very concerned that due to a strike, just in case, 32 or 33 thousand children would be left without food that day. The government was monitoring, it had all the elements on top of the table. I believe that the sanity of the union prevailed and we must assess the change in position that occurred in the internal re-discussion of refusing to make union guards, because now they will. That decision, that change of position goes in the logical sense, of the normal, of thinking about the most vulnerable”, Delgado sentenced.
On the other hand, the head of the Presidency stated that the president of the Central Board of Directors (CODICEN) of the National Administration of Public Education (ANEP), Robert Silva, has meetings every day with the union, but “make a stoppage just in case , to speak for the doubts of what will come in the Rendering of Accounts, it is difficult to explain and understand”.
