Bulgarian Teachers Face Jobs versus Pay Dilemma*

Views on BG | October 22, 2007, Monday // 00:00

By Albena Shkodrova**

"Do you know what it feels like to stand before your students in second-hand clothes? Can you imagine how it is when they come to your class with atlases you cannot afford to buy yourself ?", asks Eddy Iliev, a geography teacher at Sofia School No. 33.

He smiles, a little embarrassed by his own words, and his eyes search his empty classroom. It is the middle of October, but in most of Bulgaria's schools teaching has not started yet. Tens of thousands of teachers in the country have now been on strike for nearly four weeks, demanding a doubling of their meagre salaries.

The teachers of school No. 33 talk to us in their "coffee room" that does not even have a coffee machine - so they say it should not really bear that name. Cracks run across two of the five windows. In a corner stands an old Russian television set that broke down a long time ago.

The look of this room is telling enough of the life of the teachers working here. Their average salary, paid by the state, is €170 before tax - just enough to pay a €100 heating bill in a winter month, and live on bread and water.

Last week between 50-75,000 protesters gathered in front of the parliament, flooding the yellow cobblestoned squares in the city centre and protesting against what they call systematic neglect of Bulgarian education by the national authorities.

So far the Bulgarian government has been playing down the teachers' demands which, apart from the 100 per cent pay rise, include the call that from next year onwards 5 per cent of GDP should be allocated to education.

During the latest round of talks on Sunday and Monday, ministers offered about a 30 per cent increase, to be introduced in three stages over a year. The negotiations ended in a bitter row.

Meanwhile, education experts warn that this time the authorities and the teaching profession need to embark on serious reforms. They think any delay to reshaping national education into an efficient, sustainable system poses a long-term economic threat to the whole of society.

As the pay dispute drags on, the number of teachers on strike keeps on increasing. However, there is controversy over the exact numbers: while the unions' latest figures claim that over 80 per cent are on strike, the Ministry of Education says the proportion of those not working is below 60 per cent.

Whatever the truth about the numbers, the resolve of the strikers certainly appears to be getting stronger. "This time we will go on until the bitter end", Iliev vows. He is one of a handful of male teachers in a school dominated by women.

"Because women are often not the main breadwinners in their families, they can afford to do this job for such a meagre wage", explains the lack of a gender balance Irina Slavkova, a trade union leader at the school.

Bulgarian education was of a relatively good standard under socialism, but it suffered badly during the economic crisis that accompanied the early years of transition. Economic growth since the end of the 1990s has not improved the situation. Spending all their energy on EU reforms, successive governments have paid little attention to education and health care - two sectors left largely unregulated by the EU, and entrusted to the national authorities.

And while within the booming private sector businesses have steadily raised pay, improving the standard of living for many, the state has remained in the view of many critics a bad and inflexible employer.
As a result teachers, with their low pay, have found themselves near the bottom of Bulgarian society, their incomes amounting to only about half the average for the country.

Now, the teachers on strike will lose even this small income. If it was not for this big financial sacrifice, the strikers say many more of their colleagues would have joined them. "It's no coincidence that among the 13 - of a total of 58 - teachers who are not participating in the strike at our school, there are a number of divorced or single mothers", Slavkova says.

School No. 33 in the Bulgarian capital is an elite secondary school with 750 students - just fifty of whom are hanging around in the building today. It is a typical day, because with only a handful of their teachers available to take classes, few of the students bother to turn up at school.

The students get their education in two languages: Bulgarian, and either English or French. They have had to pass an entrance exam before they were admitted to the school. Most of them have parents who are better-off than the average Bulgarian.

This certainly does not boost the teachers' self-confidence. They say they can rarely buy new clothes. "Look around in the neighbourhood. Most of the clothes stores are second-hand shops, they are just thriving", one of the women teachers exclaims.

To be able to buy clothes for his 16-years old daughter for this school year, Eddy Iliev has had to take out a small loan. "We also needed some new furniture and money for her schoolbooks", he says. Now he has to pay it back - €75 a month, far too much compared to his low teacher's salary.

To complement his income, Iliev has found a second job. Many teachers at school No.33 have done the same. One woman gives massage treatment. Several are translators. A few do babysitting.

"Young people in our country only become teachers if they really cannot find anything else to do. Nobody is proud to become a teacher any more - on the contrary", comments Sachko Popov, electricity teacher in one of Sofia's technical schools.

His opinion is shared by many of his colleagues. "Whenever I say to somebody I am a teacher, they look at me as if I were an extra-terrestrial", says Irina Koleva, an English teacher at school No.33.

The government's position is that it can offer a more substantial pay rise only if teachers accept a 25 per cent cut in the number of teaching posts across the country. Ministers have also proposed to reward exceptional performance with additional pay. "By the end of our mandate [due in mid-2009], the income of a good teacher may reach 920 leva [€460]", Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev said in the press.

But teachers say this will mean increasing the current upper limit of 26 students in a class to 35. "It will be impossible to work this way", the teachers from school No.33 say.

The lengthy crisis in education may have grave social consequences that go well beyond schools, according to business leaders.

"We need to make the idea of reform fashionable again", wrote recently Ivo Prokopiev, chairman of the Confederation of Employers and Industrialists. "Effective investment in human capital is crucial for economic success."

He argued that the only solution to the current conflict is "a deal: [higher] salaries in return for reforms". His words were taken as a reference to the huge number of teachers in Bulgaria, which is considered by many unsustainable, especially in the context of a constantly falling student population.

"The education system's efficiency is very low, and it may continue dropping even further if the demand for a 100 per cent rise is met", he wrote in the weekly Kapital.

Teachers' unions, though, argue that further reforms can be discussed only after the humiliating situation with teachers' pay has been resolved.

Iliev sums it up: "The government is trying to ignore our strike. But I can assure them: this is, in fact, a general uprising!"

Revolutionary terms and appeals to history have now found their way into the teachers' vocabulary as they seek to widen their support. In his classic novel, "Under the Yoke", writer Ivan Vazov depicts the life of a young Bulgarian woman teacher under the Ottoman Empire. Now teachers have calculated that their dispute with the government is, for each of them, over the equivalent of what would have been just four days' pay for that character from the time of Bulgaria's 19th century national liberation movement.


* This article was made available to Novinite.com for publishing by Balkan Insight, the online publication of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN)

** Albena Shkodrova is BIRN Bulgaria country director

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