PORTUGUESE COMMUNIST PARTY

Parliamentary Group

Parliamentary Appraisal # 6 / XI-1ª

" Decree-Law No. 207/2009 of August 31 carrying out the amendment of the Staff Career Status of the Teaching Staff of the Polytechnic Higher Education Act,

approved by Decree-Law No. 185/81, of July 1 "

published in the Journal of the Republic No. 168, I Series of August 31

In announcing the revision of the Statutes of Carreiras Docent of Higher Education, the XVII Constitutional Government created a legitimate expectation from those professors who was quickly undone when the Government submitted its proposals, incidentally already belatedly and in deadlines that have not allowed even timely parliamentary intervention. The proof of this is that the capacity of Parliamentary Appraisal on the Decrees-law resulting from this statutory review could not have been exercised by the Assembly of the Republic during the X Legislature. It is in that framework that this emerges this Parliamentary Appreciation Application by the Parliamentary Group of the Portuguese Communist Party, giving fulfillment to commitments made by this Party to the professors of the Higher Education Polytechnic. It is known that in Portugal, the Higher Education Polytechnic has been the subject of a policy of systematic devaluation, fruit of a strategic conception characteristic of the right and the PS parties, which understands the Higher Education Polytechnic as a Second-category Higher Education. Regardless of whether the CFP proposes, as it is known; a single, albeit bivalent, system of public higher education; it is of the most elementary justice that even in a binary system are secured equivalent rights to the lecturers of each sub-system. It is also recognized that over the past few decades, Polytechnic Higher Education has been edited with the invaluable contribution of teachers hired to the play, subject to high job insecurity, either from the administrative point of view or from the formal and legal point of view. They were, to a large degree, those professors who made the Polytechnic Education in the subsystem of great prestige that it represents today and that by making additional qualification efforts and without any supports or stimuli, they built a polytechnic education relatively solid and very concrete linkage to the world of work, industry and productive economics. Now, after a negotiating process that has essentially been characterized by the imposition by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, teachers are faced with an authentic attack of devaluation of their decades-long work and placed in a clearly disadvantageous position when compared with teachers in a similar situation in university education. It is not at all acceptable that such teachers, regardless of the time of service they have provided in the polytechnic system, are now subjected to tendering to obtain placement in the place that is, for all purposes, currently their by-law own and, for the most part, by way of concourse.

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The way the XVII Constitutional Government proceeded to this teaching career review raises still other serious problems, of labour order but with direct and heavy implications on the quality of Portuguese higher education. The conjugation of the new Legal Regime of Higher Education Institutions and the Bases Act of the Financing of Public Higher Education with this career status highlights a critical fragility throughout the system that is, in essence, transversal to the Polytechnic and the University Graduate to the extent that the end of the tables subordinates the number of vacancies and the hiring of teachers to the budgetary framework at a juncture in which such a framework is clearly unfavourable to the quality of the teaching and the stability of the body lecturer. The transitional scheme, which will affect approximately 70% of the lecturers in the subsystem concerned, will be one of the most serious constraints imposed on these teachers. Indeed, all of these teachers ' personal and professional investment will be disbarred, by the imposition of a Ministry and a Government that tends to devalue the Polytechnic Higher Education, as indeed well evidenced in this policy. The dignifying and valorisation of Polytechnic Education and its Quality will not be to do for the devaluation of its human resources and the destruction of a pedagogical, scientific and research heritage that has been set up precisely by whom works in the lecturer within that sub-system. Therefore, the intervention of the Assembly of the Republic which the lower-signed Members of the Parliamentary Group of the CFP, under the provisions of Article 162 (c) and Article 169 of the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic and still of the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic, is necessary. Article 199 of the Rules of the Assembly of the Republic, come to apply for Parliamentary appraisal of the Decree-Law No. 207/2009 of August 31 carrying out the amendment of the Staff Career Status

Lecturer in Polytechnic Higher Education, approved by the Decree-Law No. 185/81, of July 1 , published in the Journal of the Republic No. 168, I Series, of August 31, 2009.

Assembly of the Republic, November 2, 2009

The Deputies,

BERNARDINO SOARES; JERONIMO DE SOUSA; ANTÓNIO FILIPE; JOÃO OLIVEIRA; FRANCISCO LOPES; BRUNO DIAS; JORGE MACHADO; JOSÉ SOEIRO; RITA RATO; PAULA SANTOS;

AUGUSTINE LOPES; MIGUEL TIAGO; HONORIUS NEW