The Hungarian Constitutional Court’s ruling turns teachers' right to strike into a right to beg, our Co-director Laszlo Bruszt writes in his op-ed on Merce.
The Constitutional Court (CC) approved without change the government's measures practically depriving teachers of the right to strike. “The decision is scandalous in more ways than one,” he argues.
In the op-ed he is looking for answers to how the CC has reinterpreted the right to strike as compatible with the regime and what governmental ambitions the current decision is trying to open the way for.
“The new right to strike faithfully reflects the regime’s dominant vision of a good society, of which education is only a small but important part. In short, in Fidesz's social policy combining traditional conservative and neoliberal elements, the positive externalities of the teachers' strike (quality teaching, more equal distribution of social opportunities, investment in the future, etc.) are unnecessary and avoidable costs in a system that redistributes income and opportunities from the undeserving lower middle class and the poor to the slowly growing middle and upper middle classes,” he writes.
“In this value system, the best teachers will move into the private education sphere, the upper middle class will compensate their children in private high schools for the shortcomings of public primary schools,” he concludes.
Read the full article (in Hungarian) here.