France: teachers protest against the management of the pandemic

From Paris

A private day in France: national education strike in protest at the approximate pandemic management, parliamentary blockade around the adoption of a bill to transform the health pass in another protocol (vaccine passage) and the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, isolated because he was infected with covid-19. The French Executive spent a tense Thursday at all levels, including the health with a total of 361,719 infections in the last 24 hours, 24,000 people hospitalized and 4,000 in resuscitation services. The progression of the virus accelerated by the omicron variant reached levels never seen before this second week of January.

Like hospitals that are overwhelmed and understaffed to take on the massive challenge of the pandemic, national education is another sector that has been cornered in an often extreme situation. Insufficient teachers, measures taken by eye, changing and without perspective, approximate health protocols, unsuitable premises, lack of preventive material (specific masks such as FFP2) and, above all, a government strategy that consisted in pouring the full weight of the health crisis on the educational body led to the strike this Thursday, January 13. According to the unions, the strike was followed by 75% of the staff and, according to official figures, the strike was only followed by 38%.

In the street there was the same anger against the president Emmanuel Macron and his Minister of National Education, Jean-Michel Blanquier, more dedicated to installing an ideological fight against the progressive sectors of high schools and universities than to taking into account the critical situation of education. In the streets, the teachers referred to the phrase that the head of the French State said in the newspaper Le Parisian last week when he expressed his desire to “fuck the unvaccinated.” A math teacher told PageI12:” we have stopped and come today to screw the president”. Jean Michel, a history teacher, used to say: they mistreat us, us, the students and the parents. They have taken us as the poor toy of the system and throw us into the jaws of the pandemic so that we can fix ourselves as we can. One of his companions denounced “the distance between the speeches of our minister and the poor reality in which we live: poverty wages, we do not have gel, air purifiers and they do not even give us FFP2 masks. Every day, when we return home, we wash the same cloth mask to use it again in the course tomorrow. This is not National Education but national misery”.

Read Also:  Former Argentine President Alberto Fernández is accused of embezzling money

The vaccination certificate, locked

French Prime Minister Jean Castex agreed to receive the unions for a round of negotiations with a view to improving prospects. Parallel, the government once again saw the adoption of the vaccine pass project blocked, the main content of which is that the previous health pass be transformed into a kind of complete vaccination certificate without which you will not be able to enter many public places, not even with a PCR. The government set as its objective a rapid approval of the text so that the law would enter into force on January 15. It won’t. The mixed commission made up of senators and deputies did not agree on the final text and it returned to the National Assembly. Once this procedure is completed, the text will return to the Senate and only from there, if there is an agreement between the two chambers, its adoption can be contemplated. This calendar locks the program of the Executive that thought to establish the law from next January 15. What seemed simple at first is becoming a headache for the government, all the more so since the entire management of the pandemic rests on the vaccination campaign and, therefore, on the veiled obligation to make the vaccine compulsory. The parliamentary entanglements cast mist on coherence and leave obstacles on the way to the presidential elections in April 2022 that delay the confirmation that Macron makes his candidacy for re-election official.

efebbro@pagina12. com. ar

.

Recent Articles

Related News

Leave A Reply

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here