News / Brèves Back to previous selection / Retour à la sélection précédente Portuguese Public Workers Strike in Defense of Public Services 9 November 2013 (EIRNS)—Public workers in Portugal, from firemen to garbage collectors, adminstrative personnel, teachers, nurses, and doctors, held a one-day nationwide strike against the wage and pension cuts, attacks on pension rights generally, and de facto elimination of public services contained in the 2014 budget announced by the Passos Coelho government last month. Organizers called it the biggest strike of the last two years, with more than 50% of the workforce participating in all sectors and geographic areas, and 60-90% walking off the job in most, leaving hospitals, schools, tax offices, courts, etc. shut down. The austerity measures in the 2014 budget include: * Salary cuts of between 6-12%, plus reduction of paid holidays and increases in hours worked for the same pay, driving hourly pay down even further (with the clause that if the government decides to cut workers’ hours in the future, pay will be docked, however); * Cutbacks in public services which some estimate may reduce the public workforce by 50% of its current size; * Replacement of public education by a "elite, segregated" system (call it "gated education"), cutting the budget for public schooling by 9% for basic education and 7.5% for college and science; transforming public education into job-linked schooling; and increasing funds for private schools; * Retroactive cuts in public pensions by 10%, by changing the formula for calculating them, and proposals to raise the retirement age. Leaders of the "Common Front" of 32 labor associations which organized the strike, denounced the brutal cuts in the living standards of public workers and their families as "immoral." The government claims that "There is no money! We have no alternative" are "lies," they point out, because "what this Government has already spent to ’bail-out’ the banks is more than all the cuts which they have made on us!" [ggs]