Algeria : striking civil servants threaten to toughen their protest movement if their demands are not met

The autonomous trade unions, representing civil servants, have threatened to broaden their strike action if their demands are not fulfilled by the Administration, which they accuse of seeking to nip in the bud their protest movement through various coercive and devious methods.

A spokesman for the public health trade-union, Doctor Lembarat said that the administration, under the behest of the authorities, had vainly attempted to break off the 2 – day strike in a bid to gag any future protest action by the civil servants whose only aim is to secure a higher salary and more adequate retirement benefits in keeping with the cost of living and the workers’ purchasing power.

They also called on the government not to turn a deaf ear to the workers legitimate claims, be they in the health or education sectors, and to open with their representatives a serious and responsible dialogue in a bid to hammer out an acceptable solution to the vexed salary scale issue.

Meanwhile, in a separate development, the National Education Minister Abou Bakr Benbouzid announced new measures aimed at alleviating the current school syllabus followed by first-grade pupils.

These measures provide notably for a curtailment of weekly school hours from 27 to 24 hours as well as the scrapping of courses on Thursdays and the setting up of remedial courses for these pupils on Monday afternoons.

These measures will be implemented as early as September 2008.