Tomorrow is World Teachers' Day. Nine major teachers' groups including the Taiwan Education Industry and Industry call on the Lai government to learn from the international "Recommendation on the Status of Teachers" and implement the unfinished status protection of teachers in accordance with the latest policy recommendations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). They put forward three demands, including salary protection, safeguarding professional autonomy, and reconstructing the charm of the teaching profession.
On October 5, 1966, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) jointly adopted the Recommendation on the Status of Teachers, laying the foundation for the global teaching profession. Since 1994, UNESCO and the International Education Organization (EI) have promoted the designation of October 5 as "World Teachers' Day" to remind the world not to forget this historical commitment.
The Taiwan Education Industry pointed out that the "Recommendation on the Status of Teachers" has reached its 60th anniversary. Faced with the multiple challenges of educational transformation and the severe shortage of qualified teachers around the world, the international community has faced up to the urgency of revision; Taiwan's educational environment cannot stay away from the matter, and is also caught in the crisis of teacher loss and loss of dignity in the workplace.
Faced with the shortage of teachers and various problems in the education field, Taiwan Education Industry has specifically highlighted three content appeals. The first is to grant complete labor rights, implement reciprocal consultation and legal bargaining chips, and implement institutionalized salary guarantees. Without equal bargaining rights and bargaining chips, teachers’ salary adjustments will always have to rely on the government’s one-sided charity. At the same time, an institutionalized salary review mechanism should be established to accurately reflect price inflation and economic growth, and give education personnel the economic dignity and career prospects they deserve.
The second is to implement full-time administration, clarify business boundaries and provide dedicated manpower, and safeguard teachers’ professional autonomy in teaching. The government should comprehensively and regularly review or clarify the boundaries of campus business, stop meaningless plans, results reports and government decrees, cut off the overlapping administrative business from the source, and should prepare dedicated budgets, supplement the school's full-time administrative manpower, break the sick system of "teaching to support administration", realize "administrative full-time, normalized support", and return complete lesson preparation and student care time to teachers.
In addition, teachers' working conditions should be continuously improved, teachers' rights and interests should be adjusted with the times, and the charm of the teaching profession should be reconstructed. This includes resetting manpower and teaching resources, proactively reducing class sizes and the number of teaching sessions, and opening up full formal posts for mathematics, special education, rural areas, and learning assistance; and promoting "digital offline rights", establishing reasonable total working hours limits, and legalizing teachers' after-school and regular work hours. Offline rights during holidays are strictly prohibited, and communication software interference for non-urgent matters is strictly prohibited; at the same time, the teacher support system is improved to provide professional development resources and mental health support that keep pace with the times, completely breaking the vicious cycle of "responsibility overwork" and rebuilding the attractiveness of teaching positions.
