TESA university employees call for salary raise

(story to be published in tomorrow’s issue, March 7)

The technical-administrative staff of several university centres announced it would organise protest marches because Ordinance 8/2000 through which teachers’ salaries were raised does not stipulate any raises for TESA employees. Thus, TESA personnel within the University of Bucharest was to organise a protest action yesterday in the Great Aula of the Law Faculty and they might even go on a general strike, Razvan Bobulescu, president of “Alma Mater” Federation of University Trade Unions, announced on Sunday. At the same time, the technical-administrative personnel of “Transilvania” University of Brasov was to participate yesterday in a warning strike since, after teachers’ demands were met, “the rest of us are facing the same difficult situation,” specified Niculina Dasculutu, the trade union leader of the Brasov branch UNITESA. Similar protests were also registered at the end of last week in Ploiesti and Craiova. The dean of “Transilvania” University of Brasov, Sergiu Chiriacescu, stated that “we have not solicited additional salary funds, but asked that, within the global financing granted by the National Education Ministry, University Senates should be mandated to apply the main stipulations of the Ordinance 8/2000 issued by the Government in the case of the auxiliary non-didactic personnel as well.” The dean thinks that the non-didactic personnel is as important as the didactic one “because it works within key domains such as the financial-accounting and the administrative ones”. Ordinance 8/2000 that halted the general strike unleashed within Education stipulates that benchmark salaries of the didactic personnel are to be raised to 800,000 starting April 1 and salaries of undergraduate teachers will go up to 900,000 lei starting September 1. Considering this new calculation basis, the average salary of a teacher will increase, during the first phase, by approximately 45 percent.