Lisbon, July 29, 2024 (Lusa) - Portugal's minister for internal affairs, Margarida Blasco, said that negotiations on pay rises with the GNR and PSP police forces are "closed". At the same time, representative structures promise to continue fighting for parity with the Judicial Police.
Speaking to SIC, she said that the agreement with the professional associations and unions of the security forces "was signed on 9 July" and added: "These negotiations are closed".
"We will continue to fulfil what was agreed upon, and we will resume [later] the careers review. I think it's an excellent agreement, but people are free to disagree," she added at a time when three GNR professional associations and a PSP union have promised to maintain cohesion and fight for parity with their colleagues in the Judicial Police.
Also speaking to SIC, Bruno Pereira, the president of the National Union of Police Officers, who signed the agreement, called for negotiations to be reopened.
"It was important to resume negotiations immediately so that these future changes in salary structures and other supplements can see the light of day from 1 January 2025," said Bruno Pereira, who was a spokesman for the platform of PSP unions and GNR associations to demand increases.
Pereira regretted that the protests and negotiations with the government were "worthless".
"At the end of the day, there was no point in us protesting and negotiating because all of this allowed others to achieve as much, or in this case more, without having to do so," he added.
Also on Sunday, the National Association of Sergeants of the Guard, the Independent Socio-Professional Association of the National Republican Guard, the National Autonomous Guards Association, and the Independent Union of Police Officers regretted that a "disastrous agreement" had been signed on the 9th, which they refused to sign.
In a statement released on Sunday, they criticised "the government's irreducibility in refusing to dignify the elements of the GNR and PSP at a fair value that would allow, at the very least, what is essentially different to be treated as different", and consider it "unacceptable that in Portugal an agent of authority and criminal investigation police agency, is not equated with a police element of the criminal investigation police agency, PJ (inspector)".
The organisations requested meetings with all the political forces with parliamentary representation, and Chega has since spoken to them.
The associations and the union also considered the comparisons between members of the Security Forces and members of the Armed Forces to be "absolutely unbelievable, paradoxical" and the Minister of National Defence's statements to be "absolutely serious" when he said that "on 1 January 2025, no member of the military will be paid less than a GNR or PSP".
In his opinion, the agreement reached between the Minister of Internal Affairs (MAI) and five structures of the PSP and GNR "clearly reveals the lack of political guardianship in the Internal Affairs sector", especially when comparing it "with the measures now approved for the National Defence sector".
"The agreement reached at the MAI doesn't include a single additional, immediate and concrete measure, but rather a set of intentions to revise the personnel and remuneration statutes, nothing tangible or estimable in the short/medium term that would mitigate the government's lack of will to achieve parity between the police forces," they lamented.
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