Skopje, 20 April 2022 (MIA) – The strike in schools and kindergartens will continue until the Union for Education, Science and Culture (SONK) comes to an agreement with the Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy and until an agreement is signed that incorporates all disputable issues. After the union council session focusing on the Government’s conclusions, SONK president Jakim Nedelkov said that negotiations should intensify through constructive proposals so that positions are aligned as soon as possible. “The SONK council finds that the Government conclusions are not the path to the resolution of misunderstandings among SONK, the Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy, namely the Government. This position is based on the majority of discussions by SONK members, who said that the Government conclusions aim to put pressure on the strikers. The offered ten percent of salary increase after the budget revision are ‘cemented’ by the conclusions and no room is left for negotiations on this issue, while knowing that SONK members almost unanimously rejected this proposal only a few days ago. This percentage is even lower than the proposal by one of the unions, i.e. Mden 2,800 for all salaries, something that will probably go through even without a day of strike,” Nedelkov told a press conference on Wednesday. The SONK Council has also found that certain ministers have been persistent in their efforts to intimidate strikers by saying that salaries would be cut by the number of days spent on strike. On the Government’s conclusion over the setup of a working group for drafting a collective agreement that would be negotiating with the representative union on the rights of public sector employees, Nedelkov said the general collective agreement in the public sector was not a demand by SONK, meaning that “collective agreements for child protection, elementary and secondary education will have to wait”. “The SONK council will immediately end the strike if the Government abides by the laws – alignment of salaries with the minimum wage by September, i.e. six months after adoption of the law on minimum wage. For the sake of truth, this law has not been observed once until this day,” noted Nedelkov. The strike of employees in schools and kindergartens started on April 11.