Prague - More than a half of the Czech Republic's elementary and secondary schools Monday took part in a nationwide strike for higher salaries, the teachers' trade union said. More than 130,000 teachers and school employees at nearly 6,000 schools joined the one-day strike to protest notoriously low wages, according to deputy head of school unions Marketa Vondrackova.
It was the second strike over long-term cash woes in the field for Education Minister Ondrej Liska. He was greeted to the job by protests on December 4, 2007, the very day he was appointed.
Teachers and other school employees complain that their already- low salaries have bought them less this year due to climbing prices.
While average real wages across all fields in the Czech Republic grew 2.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2008, real wages in education sector were down 4.1 per cent in the same period, according to the Czech statistics office.
The minister secured an additional 4.5 billion Czech koruny (288 million dollars) for teachers' salaries for the rest of 2008 and 2009 but the union says that the extra money will at most offset inflation.
Czech teachers are the fourth worst-paid of the 28 countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
