Lisbon Oct. 15, 2024 (Lusa) - Workers at the Tax and Customs Authority (AT) decided on Tuesday to stage a two-day strike on 19 and 20 December, demanding career development, better working conditions and a review of the salary scale.

Speaking to the Lusa news agency at the end of a general meeting of tax workers called by the Tax Workers' Union (STI), the president of that organisation also said that “if nothing happens in the meantime”, another strike is also on the table, this time for an indefinite period, for the whole of 2025.

"If the government does nothing, the forms of struggle will intensify next year, from 1 January 2025," said Gonçalo Rodrigues, assuming the “expectation that the government will have the good sense not to let things get to that point”.

Ahead of the December strike, the STI has scheduled a rally of union delegates outside the Ministry of Finance next week to warn Minister Joaquim Miranda Sarmento that "letting this go any further is bad for the country, it's bad for the government and that's not the aim" of the union.

"The union has tried everything. In these six or seven months of the [new] government, we've always been in good faith, trying to get the government to be in good faith. We gave this government time to arrive, take over the files, and understand what was happening. We have always acted in good faith, but the government has not acted in good faith with us, and I have some hope that it will change its position," said Gonçalo Rodriges.

The Lusa news agency contacted the Ministry of Finance and is still awaiting a reaction.

According to the STI leader, the general meeting, which took place throughout the morning by telematic means, was attended by "guaranteed to be more than 3,500" AT employees, which implied the closure of 80% of the country's tax offices.

"It was the biggest meeting ever in the history of AT workers, including before there was AT. So it was the biggest meeting ever in the tax office," he emphasised.

Called "with one item on the agenda, which was the definition of short, medium and long-term forms of struggle", the meeting ended up serving as an opportunity for the tax officials to "say everything that's on their minds, what worries them and why they're sad and angry", said the STI president.

And, he emphasised, "the main reason for their discontent is that the government considers all state careers to be very important, but the AT, which has to find resources so that the other careers can work, considers it irrelevant".

According to Gonçalo Rodrigues, this was "said directly, with all the letters, by the government" to the union at a meeting last September with the secretaries of state for public administration and tax affairs. He lamented that the finance minister "never even found the time" to listen to the STI.

Another of the tax officials' demands is revising the salary scale, which the union says is “worse than the one they had in 1999”.

"The government has promised other professions 20% increases until 2027 - doctors were given a raise in 2023 and will be given another raise in 2024, teachers have had all their service time recovered - and we've lost everything? We've lost our SIADAP [Integrated System for Performance Management and Evaluation in the Public Administration] points, we've lost our evaluation points, and we have a salary scale worse than the one we had in 1999?" asked the STI president.

At this morning's meeting, the union leader also said there was "a lot of talk about burnout" and the "many problems related to tax inspection and the lack of authority to combat fraud and tax evasion".

Emphasising that "although corruption is a crime that falls within the competence of the Public Prosecutor's Office", the AT "plays a decisive role, because there are no corrupt people unless there is money outside the tax system", Gonçalo Rodrigues says that the "role of authority" of the tax authorities "has been completely degraded".

"To sum up, the AT has hit rock bottom," says the STI president, warning that the strike on 19 and 20 December - with a demonstration in Lisbon on the 19th - will be “just the first” of several, if nothing changes in the meantime.

PD/ADB // ADB.

Lusa