Workers at the Tax and Customs Authority (AT) decided this Tuesday to schedule a two-day strike, on December 19th and 20th, demanding career advancement, better working conditions and a review of the salary scale.
Speaking to the Lusa agency at the end of a general meeting of tax workers called by the Tax Workers Union (STI), the president of that structure also said that, “if nothing happens in the meantime”, another strike is also on the table , this time for an indefinite period, for the entire year 2025.
“If nothing happens on the part of the Government, the forms of struggle will harden for next year, from January 1, 2025”, guaranteed Gonçalo Rodrigues, although assuming the “expectation that the Government has the common sense not to let things get to that point.”
Before the December strike, the STI scheduled for next week, the 25th, a concentration of union delegates at the door of the Ministry of Finance, to warn minister Joaquim Miranda Sarmento that “letting this progress further is bad for the country, it’s bad for the Government and that is not the objective” of the union.
“The union tried everything. We spent these six or seven months of the (new) Government always in good faith, trying to ensure that the Government was also in good faith. We gave time for this Government to arrive, take care of the dossiers and understand the We always acted in good faith, but the Government did not act in good faith with us and I have some hope that it will change its position”, maintained Gonçalo Rodriges.
The Lusa agency contacted the Ministry of Finance, still awaiting a reaction.
According to the director of the STI, in the general meeting that took place throughout the morning today, via telematic means, “guaranteedly more than 3,500” AT employees participated, which resulted in the closure of 80% of the country’s Finance services.
“It was the biggest meeting ever in the history of Treasury workers, even before there were TAs. Therefore, it was the biggest meeting ever in the tax authorities”, he emphasized.
Convened “with an agenda point, which was the definition of forms of struggle in the short, medium and long term”, the meeting ended up serving the tax authorities to “say everything that is in their soul, what worries them and why that they are sad and disgusted”, said the president of STI.
And, he highlighted, “the main reason for discontent is that the Government considers all State careers to be very important, but AT, which has to find resources so that other careers can work, considers it to be irrelevant”.
According to Gonçalo Rodrigues, this was “said directly, in all letters, by the Government” to the union, in a meeting last September with the Secretaries of State for Public Administration and Fiscal Affairs. The Finance Minister “never even found time” to listen to the STI, he lamented.
Another demand from tax officials is the revision of the salary scale, which the union says is “worse than what they had in 1999”.
“The Government, for other professions, is promising increases of 20% until 2027 – doctors were increased in 2023 and will be increased again in 2024, teachers have recovered all the service time they had – and we lost everything? Did we lose our SIADAP (Integrated System for Management and Performance Assessment in Public Administration) points, did we lose our evaluation points and do we have a worse salary table than the one we had in 1999?”, asks the president of the STI.
At this morning’s meeting, the union leader also said that “there was a lot of talk about ‘burnout'” and the “many problems related to tax inspection and the lack of authority to actually combat fraud and tax evasion”.
Stressing that, “although corruption is a crime within the competence of the Public Prosecutor’s Office”, the AT “has a decisive role, because there are no corrupt people without there being money outside the tax system”, Gonçalo Rodrigues says that the “role of authority” of the tax authorities “have been completely degraded”.
“To sum up, AT hit bottom”, says the president of the STI, warning that the strike on December 19th and 20th — with a demonstration in Lisbon on the 19th — will be “just the first” of several, if nothing else in this half time change.
Source: www.jornaldenegocios.pt
