In Hungary, the right to strike has been curtailed by Viktor Orbán

In Hungary, the right to strike has been curtailed by Viktor Orbán

A group of teachers pose in February 2022. The message reads: “The right to strike is a fundamental right.”

(Pedagógusok Demokratikus Szakszervezetének)

Éva Vatai, a French teacher at a high school in Pécs, in southern Hungary, cannot believe it. She was recently docked five per cent of her pay – 16,700 forint (€44) out of a net monthly salary of Ft300,000 (€790) – after refusing to go to work in protest at the working conditions in her profession, in February 2022. She and her colleagues refer to the action taken as “civil disobedience”, as they are not able to fully exercise their right to strike under the current legislation in Hungary.

Almost 30 per cent of teachers took part in one of the largest mobilisations in recent years, according to the democratic teachers’ union PDSZ (Pedagógusok Demokratikus Szakszervezetének). It all started on 31 January 2022, when some 20,000 teachers held a two-hour pre-emptive stoppage, accompanied by a motorcade, calling for the defeat of the government in the April parliamentary elections, among other solidarity actions. On 16 March, Hungary’s two main teachers’ unions, the PDSZ and PSZ (Pedagógusok Szakszervezete), went on strike again for more than two weeks, after five months of fruitless negotiations with the government.

Their demands were linked to the low pay and the deteriorating working conditions in the sector. Hungary is second-to-last in terms of teachers’ pay in the European Union. This explains the shortfall of almost one in two maths teachers, for example, according to the specialist think tank T-TUDOK. The staff shortages are growing worse as more and more teachers leave schools to earn a better living in catering and retail, at a time when schools are having to cope with an influx of refugee pupils from Ukraine.

“We cannot work under such conditions. For 15 years, I have seen the ship sinking in education and I refuse to keep quiet,” says Vatai, who, after 40 years in the profession, admits that her salary is three times lower than that of her son, who works as a carpenter. She explains:

“Viktor Orbán has no education policy, except to impose nationalist writers on the curriculum. He overburdens us, infantilises us and humiliates us. The teachers and the pupils have lost their motivation.”

There was a 10 per cent pay rise for teachers in January 2022, a few weeks before the elections, “except that it wasn’t an increase in salary, but in bonuses”, explains Erzsébet Nagy, president of the PDSZ, which is calling for a 45 per cent pay rise “to reach the 2021 minimum wage, because we are currently indexed to the 2014 minimum wage,” the trade unionist continues. A pay rise is all the more necessary given the soaring rate of inflation in Hungary, with experts forecasting a price increase of over 10 per cent in the coming weeks.

“It was a great experience. It was the biggest mobilisation of my life, we received a lot of solidarity from the students and parents, who didn’t send their children to school.” The strike was supported by several demonstrations around the country. The artists’ collective noÁr produced the rap song We Want to Learn!, describing the difficulties of teachers, and a website, Ne dolgozz ingyen! (Don’t Work for Free!), was created to denounce unpaid overtime.

For Vatai, the momentum was regrettably lost with the re-election of Viktor Orbán for the third time in a row in April 2022, bringing civil society and the opposition to a temporary standstill, and leaving the teachers’ unions not wanting to take action again before the end of the school year.

Strike made illegal by the government

Vatai chose to engage in civil disobedience in February – an action not backed by the unions but followed by several hundred schools across the country – because the strike announced in December by the PDSZ and PSZ was deemed illegal.

On what grounds? A minimum service clause in public services introduced by the Orbán administration in 2010, amending the 1989 law on the right to strike. “This legislation has changed everything, because it requires the parties to agree on a minimum service. And until the courts have made a final decision on the matter, the strike is illegal,” explains Nagy of PDSZ. “The court can ask the parties questions and this process can take weeks. This is exactly what happened with the mobilisation of 31 January, which was deemed illegal, because the appeal ruling was delayed,” adds the trade unionist, who clearly sees in this a desire to simply discourage all strikes.

Another nebulous area of Hungary’s minimum service rules is that it remains unclear which professions are required to comply with it. “Education is not mentioned in the professions listed in the law,” argues Nagy. Judit Zeller, a lawyer with the Hungarian civil liberties union TASZ, also finds this concept of minimum service problematic.

“The education sector has already had to call off strike action in the past because no agreement was reached with the government, even through the courts. Furthermore, in Hungary, several court decisions have deemed education to be one of the sectors that must provide a minimum service, on a par with public transport or energy companies. And yet, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), education is exempt from the minimum service requirement. As long as the children’s safety and meals are guaranteed, teaching per se is not mandatory,” adds Zeller.

The government, with the help of its media mouthpieces, including the public broadcasting service, has been relentless in its demonisation of the strikers. “We ask the unions not to provoke chaos, not to incite teachers to violate the law, we ask them to wait for the court’s final response and to postpone the strike,” said the education ministry in a statement in January. After the strike, the same ministry praised the “teachers who considered that a strike was not necessarily appropriate when the neighbouring country is at war and we have to take care of the children arriving in Hungary.”

Following the onset of the pandemic and the introduction of a state of emergency, the Hungarian government granted itself the power to govern by decree, a power it used in February 2022 to further regulate minimum services.

As the state of emergency was coming to an end on 1 June 2022, the parliament rushed to turn the February decree into a legislative amendment. Adopted on 24 May, the legislation now requires teachers preparing high school students for the baccalaureate to teach 100 per cent of their classes. The minimum service requirement is set at 50 per cent for non-baccalaureate pupils and provision has to be made for taking care of children in the schools.

“Since when do you have to teach 100 per cent of the classes when you go on strike?” says Nagy, who is convinced that the amendment and the decree that preceded it are not constitutional. Her union has filed an appeal with the Hungarian Constitutional Court and is ready to go to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.

“The right to strike has been completely inapplicable in Hungary since 2010. Before, it wasn’t necessarily easy to put pressure on your employer, but it wasn’t impossible; the railway workers managed to do it for example, but since then it is no longer possible,” says Boros Péterné, head of the civil servants’ and public employees’ union MKKSZ (Magyar Köztisztviselők, Közalkalmazottak és Közszolgálati Dolgozók Szakszervezete). “Our employees in the social sector, for example, have been trying for two years to go on strike, but they can’t do it because the government, which is our bargaining partner, demands a 100 per cent minimum service, which makes it impossible to exercise the right to strike. We have been to court five times with the same case, to no avail. The government is abusing the minimum service requirement and the courts are helping it to do so,” says the trade unionist, who warns: “These employees will end up leaving the sector en masse, which could jeopardise the quality of the public service.”

Systematic rights violations

Hungary is decidedly one of the worst countries in Europe when it comes to trade union rights and labour laws. In 2019, Viktor Orbán triggered a major wave of protests in the country by deregulating overtime. According to the 2021 International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) Global Rights Index, Hungary is in category four (out of six), where rights violations are considered systematic. “The collective rights of healthcare workers were curtailed with the banning of any future collective agreements from January 2021 onwards, while all collective agreements concluded so far expired on the same date,” reports the ITUC. The pandemic was used as a pretext for the government to restrict the rights of health care workers, even preventing them from speaking out in the media about the pandemic.

The restriction of the right to strike is a violation of Article 3 of ILO Convention 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize, ratified by Hungary in 1957. The ILO Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Recommendations also expressed concern about this tightening of the screws in its 2022 report, noting the observations received on 1 September 2017 from the ITUC, alleging acts of intimidation, anti-union dismissals and union busting in several enterprises.

This article has been translated from French by Louise Durkin