New school year will start after September 15

||National Agencies

*** For the president of the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers, a teacher should earn, on average, the value of the food basket**

The new 2024-2025 school year is scheduled to begin on September 16. According to Edgar Machado, president of the Venezuelan Union of Teachers of the Capital District-FVM (Sinvema), the academic period is plagued by a series of problems such as patchwork schedules and the “lack of decent pay for educational personnel,” which has led to a shortage of teachers.

The union representative stressed that Venezuelan workers have gone 890 days without receiving a salary increase, which means that they have spent more than two and a half years with the same income “in a country where there is inflation.”

For her part, Carmen Teresa Marques, president of the Venezuelan Federation of Teachers (FVM), said that at this moment “there is an educational crisis in the country” that should be the priority for the government.

“The need is serious. We demand that the national government and the Minister of Education sit down to continue discussing collective bargaining so that a teacher can have a good salary and be motivated to go to work with joy,” the spokesperson emphasized in a radio interview.

Marques explained that a teacher in the public sector has a salary of 30 dollars and the financial aid offered by the national Executive with the so-called War Bonds.

“It is not in the workers’ interest because it is a bonus that has no impact on social benefits or vacations.”

He also compared the situation of a teacher in a public school with that of a teacher in a private institution, where “there is a huge disparity” because they are also given monthly bonuses, but these can reach 200 dollars.

Regarding how much a teacher should earn in Venezuela, the president of the Federation stressed that it should be an amount close to the basic food basket ($500). “It has to be a salary that is fairly close to the food basket.”

THE APPOINTMENT

“We have teachers who we don’t know if they will return to their workplaces because they are looking for other sources of income that will allow them to survive with their families.” Professor Edgar Machado.

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