School, 400 million ready for contract renewal: negotiations to close within a month

Ready the 400 million for the renewal of the school contract. Negotiations resumed yesterday with the aim of closing within a month. In the meantime, the Minister of Education, Giuseppe Valditara, is arriving with the act of addressing the resources to be allocated to staff increases. Yesterday the school unions met at the Aran headquarters for the first meeting of 2023 on the renewal of the National Collective Labor Agreement for the Education and Research Sector for the three-year period 2019-2021 and thus, after the Christmas break, discussions were reopened on various topics which will then be addressed in the next scheduled meetings.

The steps

The president of Aran, Antonio Naddeo, communicated to the unions that the integration of the policy act by the minister Valditara is nearing completion, to definitively transfer the 300 million euros that the ex-minister Bianchi wanted to allocate instead to the valorisation of merit. These are resources already allocated in the 2022 budget law, which will now end up in the contract. To these must be added another 100 million euros, to be considered a one-off payment, which will instead have to finance the fixed component of the ancillary salary: 85.8 million euros for teachers and 14.2 million for ATA staff, i.e. for all the auxiliaries, technicians and administrators in service in the school, for 2022. “The act of address – explains Francesco Sinopoli, secretary of the Flc CGIL – is used to implement what was established in the signing of the Agreement”.

The positions

And so the negotiations go on, the president of Aran is working to reach a conclusion as soon as possible. Unions still need a few weeks. “At the next meetings – they explain from the Uil school – a complete survey of the resources still available will be made, which will also include the new loan, equal to 150 million, provided for by the 2023 Budget Law”. In the next meetings, scheduled for next week on 17, 18 and 19 January, the analysis of the draft contract that Aran sent to the union organizations for a possible definition article by article will begin. «The next ones will be political meetings – explains the general secretary of the Cisl Scuola, Ivana Barbacci – to untie the knots and thus speed up the process, it will take more or less a month to close the confrontation. The topics to be dealt with concern training, the constraints of mobility, the disciplinary responsibility of school personnel”.

The report

Yesterday, Aran published the six-monthly report on contract renewals in the public sector, which shows a clear disparity between the salaries of public employees compared to those of private individuals. Observing the average annual contractual wages between 2013 and September 2022, in fact, it can be seen that those of civil servants grew by 6.7%, against a 13.8% increase in prices in the same period. On the other hand, wages in the private sector, excluding executives, increased by 11.6%. In the private sector, wages in industry stand out, registering an increase of 13.2% compared to 9.8% for those in services.
In addition to the wage disparity between the two sectors, public and private, the impact of the loss of purchasing power is also highlighted with more than seven percentage points. The Aran also underlined that, until 2016, there was a freeze on salaries in the public sector: the salaries of public managers held up better than the price increase but for all the rest of the public staff, the loss of power of purchase has touched the 9 points. However, the percentage has been declining in the last period,