Some 15,000 Romanian teachers took to the streets of Bucharest on May 25 on the fourth day of a strike over low salaries and insufficient funding for education with no sign of a deal with the coalition government in sight.
More than 150,000 primary and secondary school teachers plus auxiliary staff on May 22 declared a general strike, the first such protest staged by Romanian education unions since 2005, while university personnel staged a two-hour work interruption in a sign of solidarity.
Protesters on May 25 gathered outside the government headquarters on Victoria Square in central Bucharest chanting "Dignity," "Wake up, Romania!" and "Any nation dies without education" after union representatives refused a compromise offer from the government of Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca.
Hundreds of secondary school students joined the protest in solidarity with their teachers, while passersby stopped and applauded the column of demonstrators.
The government's offer of two one-off bonuses -- the equivalent of $215 in June and $325 in July -- instead of salary increases, inflation indexing, and overtime pay -- was refused by unions that called it "offensive" as negotiations broke down, threatening to extend the strike to the end of the school year, putting final exams at risk.
SEE ALSO: As Teachers' Strike Grips Romania, They're Not The Only Professionals Feeling 'Humiliated' And UnhappyA Romanian teacher's starting monthly salary is the equivalent of just over $520 compared to the national average of $988.
The center-left/center-right coalition government has argued that it cannot offer more to the teachers because a further increase would threaten obtaining recovery funds earmarked by the European Commission for Romania -- an argument rejected by the unions as a lie.
Many teachers have left Romania's education system because of the small salaries, while thousands of fresh graduates prefer to leave the country and take menial but much better paid jobs abroad rather than becoming educators.
The aging staff and lack of young competent teachers as well as decades of failure to reform and invest in Romania's education system have prompted an acute crisis.
According to a European Union study from 2019, about 40 percent of Romanian 15-year-olds lack basic competence in reading, math, or sciences, and although literate have a very limited general knowledge about society, people, and the world -- generally fulfilling the definition of functional illiteracy.