Hours to misery!

Bright sunlight and a gained free period – who could want more?  And getting towards the weekend.

But wait!  The Day of Shame approaches.  A tedious, mind-bendingly boring meeting scheduled (and actually going to happen!) on a Saturday morning!

I have confidently been expecting the meeting to be changed to a Friday evening.  This is a shocking hope, I know, but it just shows how twisted academic life is here if you can even begin to think of a extended meeting on a Friday evening after school as some sort of triumph!

But even this sad compromise is not to be.  The meeting has been confirmed for Saturday.  Which is bad.  What is worse is the jokingly fatalistic attitude of my colleagues who even josh each other about how hard done by they are!

I am, of course, as who would expect otherwise, totally appalled by the idea and am bitterly and inwardly convulsed with disgust at the whole concept.  Mindless educational tedium during my weekend!  My gorge rises at the mere thought!

However, I will be there.  Unsmiling and glowering, but I will be there.

It will be also the last time that I go to such a meeting.  My head of department will be informed of this at the end of the fiasco.  There is another one scheduled for next year.  I will not, emphatically not be there.  Let the consequences be what they will!

Things appear to be moving to some sort of climax as far as the educational world is concerned.  The government has discovered that the only money it can easily save is that which is paid to its workers.  There’s a surprise!

Now that we have a right wing government, it is only a matter of time before our right wing leaders let us know what they are actually going to do with the power that they have gained.  The leader of the right wing party was particularly carefully to say bugger all about what he might be thinking of doing as his response to the financial crisis as it begins (!) to engulf the country as we march relentlessly downhill after feckless, irresponsible Italy.

The first mutterings about financial savings have been directed towards civil servants.  That term has a slightly different meaning in this country where even some teachers fall into the category.  Our school is a foundation (whatever that means here, I suspect it is merely a way of getting tax exemptions) and our status is nearest to a grant maintained school in Britain.

Although we charge parents for each child that crosses into our demesne, the government pays for the teachers in Primary and Secondary.  Why?  No idea.  The teachers in the foetal section of the school who teach the Very Small People and those who teach the equivalent of the Sixth Form are paid for by the Foundation.

So I have two cheques each month, one from the Foundation and the other from the Generalitat to reflect the proportions of my teaching which are respectively in each sector.

Last year the Generalitat cut the money it gave to the school by 5%, but the school (The Foundation) decided to make up the money so that no teacher (whatever the proportion of money actually stopped) had less than s/he had before.

The Generalitat is thinking (has decided) to cut civil servants (i.e. our, in spite of the fact that we are not proper civil servants) pay further and it is unlikely that this extra cut will be ameliorated by the largesse of the Foundation. 

I will then have to consider my position, as I am emphatically not a registered charity.  And certainly not for the benefit of children of the same wealthy parents who probably helped precipitate the crisis in the first place!

I am truly shocked by how little colleagues seem to know about what is going to happen to their livelihoods.  They have only the haziest notion of how their salaries are going to be affected by the unfolding political and economic situation.  And if they truly care then they are managing to hide it well from me!

I bet I am the only person to have approached the bursar in the school and asked if The Foundation has taken any decisions about how to approach the possible reductions in pay.  I was told that as the governments, both national and local, have not made any finalized decisions themselves then the Foundation has not been able to formulate its response.  But I was also informed that it would probably be unlikely that the whole of the cost of the reduction in wages would be covered by the Foundation itself. 

So, with our wages frozen since 2009 and the year-on-year inflation not being reflected in a pay rise and the prospect of an actual cut in the salary, I am too depressed to even attempt to calculate the actual and real percentage drop in the value of the money that I take home each month!

Hard times indeed.  And added to that is the expectation that the pay freeze will be extended by at least another year!

I am no economist, and cordially loathed the economic theory that I had to pretend that I had assimilated for my A Level, but I fail to see how an economy can be stimulated by the punitive reducing of the wages of a substantial proportion of the working population of a country.  Inflation does not appear to have been tackled in any meaningful way and everyone can see quite clearly that prices are rising while the ability to compensate for these increases is being eroded by diminishing pay.

I will be very interested to see the figures for the spending during the Christmas period.  I know that there is a particular form of specifically Christmas moral blackmail which prompts parents to spend much more than they can actually afford, but that is true for each Christmas.

Perhaps there will be a Giffen Good effect (one of the few economic concepts that stay with me) where it describes the counter intuitive phenomenon of the rising in the price of a good actually causing an increase in its demand.  I think that this was first observed with cheap staple goods when the rise in something like bread for the very poor would mean that they give up other things to have more of the staple; so they no longer buy meat because they have limited funds left after the increase in the price of bread so they buy more bread with the small amount of money that they have left after they have bought bread because it is not enough to buy a reasonable amount of meat.

And that explanation probably demonstrates in as clear a way as possible the reason that I didn’t pursue economic studies once the A Level was safely out of the way!

So, according to my analysis parents will spend more on a festival with a high moral blackmail constant, by spending less on others with a slightly lower.

A child in Catalonia has three distinct opportunities for being spoilt in the Christmas period.  There is obviously Christmas Day itself, but in Catalonia it is Christmas Eve which is traditionally the time for presents to be exchanged.  There is also Epiphany or Kings in early January when a great fuss is made of the arrival of the Three Kings with parades and sweet throwing and present giving.  There is therefore, an opportunity for parents (if they haven’t already) to amalgamate all three celebrations into one and make their chosen one more extravagant than the spread of expected expenditure.

The trick, I suppose, is not to over-compensate and find yourself paying more on one than you would for the three.  Although the more I think about it the less like Giffen Goods the whole situation seems to be.  So much for my A Level!

The latest news on the governmental cuts to education is that the government is slightly backtracking.  They (or more properly “it”) are talking about taking away some of the perks that civil servants expect as part of their jobs, for example, lunch tickets.  This sounds suspiciously like emptying the ashtrays on a 747 to decrease the weight – and yes, I do know that there is no smoking on flights nowadays and that is part of the point.

The real expenses in terms of civil servants are chronic overstaffing, ludicrously generous pensions; free private health services; general corruption and the job-for-life attitude which characterizes the life style that functionarios have become accustomed to. 

Changing the fundamental and expensive elements that the government has to tackle is going to cause ructions and change the face of Spain.  If the government decides to do something about it.  If!  Let me emphasise yet again that although we are classed as some sort of civil servant in the way that we are funded, we are not classed as the sort of civil servant that is entitled to the generous financial packages that our more privileged colleagues (some of whom are teachers, but they have passed professional examinations to gain the title of functionario) enjoy.

I will wait, without holding my breath, to listen to the echoes of outraged loss for the targeted group.   Am far more likely to hear the rumble of retreating footsteps from the politicians appalled by the negative howls of anguish from their affronted employees!  At least I hope so, because their cause will become ours.

It looks more and more likely that the notorious “extra” pays will be the target for the government.  The idea that there will be 14 payments during the year does not mean that there are any extras there.  It is just the fact that two tranches of money which you have earned are not paid to you in monthly instalments.  And now they are under attack.  If, of course they had been integrated into the normal monthly salary then they would not have been able to pick it off so easily.

The “plans” are not fully formulated and therefore there is still hope before the money is “untim’ly ripped” from our less than inspiring wage!  We teach the kids that the difference between “wage” and “salary” is that the latter is paid monthly and the former weekly, but with the amount that I get I do not think that it qualifies as a professional sum at all and therefore the more homely term of “wage” seems to fit it better!

The lesson is coming to an end.  I have been able to type in it because, strange to relate, the kids are taking an exam!  Well, there’s a thing!

This is my “early” leave for home so that I can ponder the fact that, in spite of it being a Friday I still have another morning of school to look forward to tomorrow.

“Shame!” I hear myself scream.  And scream again.