After nearly three years of patience, workers in pre-school education have taken to the streets. On Saturday, 12 April, nursery teachers and other kindergarten staff held a protest in Zagreb’s main square.

They arrived from all over Croatia with almost the same demands as in 2022 – legally mandated pay, respect for prescribed conditions and a change to the funding system – to tell Education Minister Radovan Fuchs that due to the continuous state of the profession, they are giving him a “yellow card before exclusion.”

Unlike their colleagues in schools, the kindergarten workers who gathered in Ban Jelačić Square last Saturday are not protesting to raise legal standards, but are fighting for the legal minimum. Article 51 of the Preschool Education Act stipulates that the salaries of kindergarten workers should be equal to those of primary school workers, while the State Pedagogical Standard from 2008 prescribes a limit of 20 children per group. These regulations are largely not respected, and nursery teachers often work in oversized groups for inadequate compensation. As nursery teacher Tina Bebić summarised for H-Alter at the protest: “We are here primarily because we are asking for the State Pedagogical Standard to be respected, for Article 51 to be respected, and to have salaries in accordance with the law. We also want working conditions worthy of people and children’s lives in kindergartens.”

Kindergarten users and their parents are regularly greeted with inadequate conditions such as rooms that are too small, too few toilets for the number of children, and insufficient basic materials. Due to being overworked, nursery teachers cannot provide adequate individual attention. Due to poor spatial and financial conditions, the number of professional nursery teachers – who according to law must complete an appropriate degree for their work – is decreasing, and gaps in the number of professionals are being patched up by assistants from completely different professions. One bright protest banner summarised the essence of the profession’s frustration with this situation: “If a hairdresser can be a nursery teacher, can I be a minister for a bit?” During the protest, nursery teachers from northern Croatia, Slavonia and other parts of the country described in their speeches and performances their experiences of precarious work in non-compliant conditions of a degraded profession, consistently emphasising that children deserve better. They were led by the nursery teachers’ Association Sidro and the Union of Education, Media and Culture (SOMK), whose president Božica Žilić told those gathered: “We will not be invisible, we are here, our protest is justified.”

In an interview with H-Alter the previous day, Žilić explained which actions by the authorities justify the mass rebellion of nursery teachers. Workers and their representatives have been addressing kindergarten founders – municipalities and cities – who do not comply with regulations for years. According to the Preschool Education Act, they are obliged to finance kindergartens from city and municipal budgets, including salaries according to the legal standard. But the vast majority fail to do so. Only a small portion of local government units actually refuse to sit down with unions and negotiate, and some of the more stubborn founders have realised it’s time for change after local pressure from workers: “They have made a radical turnaround because they are aware that the salary must be at least that determined by the legislator,” said Žilić.

However, such positive but small shifts hide a systemic problem. Not all cities and municipalities have equal resources and, according to Žilić, they cannot reach the legal level of salary funding: “Some of them, with whom we have been working for many years, we can understand because it’s actually about 73 percent of their budget, which for some municipalities and cities means they could literally shut up shop if they were to comply with this.” The current crisis in nursery teaching, Žilić and the protesters believe, is therefore the responsibility of the state. The main demand of the protesters was to change the kindergarten funding model, whereby the Ministry of Science, Education and Youth would take responsibility for the salaries of workers. “This system cannot survive if no one cares about it, and the minister and the Ministry of Education should care about the system,” emphasised the president of the Sidro Association, Katarina Turković Gulin, during her speech.

This demand is based on financial analysis conducted by her association in cooperation with as many as 66 cities and municipalities. As she told H-Alter after the protest, it was an extensive study of “past costs to see how much we actually need. We found that the state invested about 160 million euros last year, and we need about 480 million annually just to ensure that salaries are in line with the law. This cannot be transferred to local government units because they don’t have that money, and then the Ministry turns a blind eye to irregularities because it knows they don’t have it, so it won’t punish them.” As Žilić clarified to us, the Ministry’s supervision to date has been slow, and it would take a month and a half from filing a complaint to going out into the field, and more warnings than sanctions were issued. Lately, she says, penalties are being applied, although unionists would be happier if the State Pedagogical Standard were applied.

The protest organisers sent their demands and the aforementioned analysis to the Ministry in March, and alongside the implementation of existing laws, they asked the state to take on the burden of nursery teachers’ salaries, for which they also offered a detailed model proposal. The Minister only responded on 4 April, two days after the press conference announcing the protest. In a letter to the unions, he stated that he supports their demands “to ask mayors to pay overtime (...) [and to] eliminate all overloads resulting from non-compliance with the Law”. When H-Alter inquired about such support for the protest, asking whether he agrees to changes in the funding model and how often he supervises kindergarten institutions, the Ministry also shifted the focus to the lower level – stating that it had “requested compliance with Article 51” and “warned founders” to respect the state standard.

The Ministry also attached to its response a letter to the founders, a press release and a response to the union. In the latter, they again pass the buck to local government and encourage unions to ask “owners and founders to align salaries with the Law”. Nursery teachers and their representatives, therefore, can address the level that itself does not want or cannot comply with the law for its implementation, but not the responsible Ministry. In response to the request for a change in the funding model, the Ministry “reminds” that the state has “given up income tax and handed it over to local and regional government units” which can choose how to spend it. In addition, the state finances kindergartens “through fiscal equalisation” and “tenders for equipment and construction”. According to the Ministry, founders and nursery teachers should solve other problems themselves.

The Minister therefore reminded founders in his letter of the penalties they could face for irregularities in their work – 1,061.78 euros for a kindergarten director and 1,990.84 for the kindergarten itself, which should be paid from the city or municipality’s budget. As Žilić said in the interview, “a fairly large number of mayors have taken this as pressure and a threat. They say they will lease out kindergartens if they are penalised, because they cannot fulfil the obligation of legal salaries. That’s quite a bad message and a very serious situation, and in the middle are workers, a tennis net over which the ball of responsibility is being tossed.” The letter did not address the difference in necessary and available funding from the Sidro Association’s analysis.

Kindergarten workers consider the Ministry’s reaction empty and declarative, which they expressed in Saturday’s speeches and banners such as “respect the laws you passed” and “they don’t give a Fuchs about us”. At the culmination of the protest, workers in the square raised square yellow cards – giving Fuchs a “yellow card before exclusion” for delayed reactions and declarative reassurance. Žilić explained his second offence in our conversation: “He didn’t offer a concrete solution or deadline, except to announce a penalty. Neither the penalty nor that legal provision is new. He told us that apart from punishment methods, he has no way to pressure local government units, but I don’t think the problem is with them, rather that there is no substantive policy for early preschool education. We are definitely on the margins, the last hole on the flute, and only when a critical mass rises and organises a public protest does someone react.”

As described by the interviewees we spoke with, municipalities and cities, despite all irregularities, are much more willing to engage in dialogue and gradually solve problems. They are extremely satisfied with progress in the capital. In recent years, the City of Zagreb has been concluding robust collective agreements with union representatives like SOMK, which are supplemented every year, and expanding kindergarten capacity is a major part of their mandate and current campaign. We therefore contacted the city administration and asked if the City supports the protesters’ demands, how it comments on Minister Fuchs’ letter, and whether it agrees with the funding model proposed by the Sidro Association. We did not receive answers by the time of publication.

However, when asked about the protest at a press conference on 1 April, Deputy Mayor Danijela Dolenec said that increasing the capacity of kindergarten institutions in Zagreb must certainly be accompanied by an increase in staff. The current administration, she said, has built or is currently building a total of 18 kindergartens, and plans more: “These are really huge capacity increases that must be accompanied by new employment. In the City of Zagreb, the system is larger by over 1,000 [workers] and what the profession itself draws attention to is that it must be adequately paid to attract people to the occupation. (...) Throughout these four years, we have been maintaining social dialogue with unions, making sure that salaries are increased. But certainly, these working conditions need to be further improved.”

The protesters confirm the situation of existing challenges but also gradual progress. For Turković Gulin, the situation in Zagreb is far from ideal, but she considers the openness to dialogue of the current administration crucial: “The groups are large, the burden is terrible. But the founder, unions and professional associations are aware of this and we see work being done to ease the burden. We have support that tells us that people in the City care about preschool education.”

Žilić agrees with this assessment and gave us an example of the recent understaffing of Zagreb’s kindergarten workers: “In Zagreb, a few months ago during the period of viruses, about 650 workers were on sick leave daily. If we didn’t have [unskilled collaborators] with whom we ’patch things up’, I think we could close some kindergartens. I often think that organising work in such conditions is on the verge of science fiction.” In such a situation, Žilić considers the continuous cooperation of unions with Zagreb to be a great example of social partnership: “The Zagreb collective agreement is one of the qualitatively better ones. The cooperation is extremely fair, the social dialogue is at an enviable level. I’m not a political person, but along with other cities, Zagreb should be an example of how much we respect each other.” Perhaps that’s why during the protest, the preschool workers from the host city spoke the least. So we asked local nursery teacher Tea Pleše for a comment on the spot. “I have faith that the situation in Zagreb is moving towards better and higher quality working conditions,” she said. “The shift is happening very slowly, but it is visible, the number of children in nursery groups is finally falling below twenty. The salary is decent, not ideal given the prices that continue to rise, but it is in accordance with the law.”

Nursery teachers in Croatia will have to continue to nourish their faith in their own profession and the laws that should protect it with small steps, and for real progress, the Ministry will also have to get its hands dirty. In the meantime, they are driven forward by the creativity they cultivate within imposed limitations. As Turković Gulin described, the protest was therefore “a bit of sadness, a bit of great anger and dissatisfaction, a bit of song. We nursery teachers can express these emotions so creatively that the whole square was dancing despite how terrible and difficult the situation in kindergartens is.” Such resourcefulness and unity inspire Turković Gulin for further struggle, and in doing so, the primary concern for both her and the nursery teachers is the children, who deserve that the state adheres to its own standards. As she concluded, for their early development to be accompanied by adequate conditions, nursery teachers and unions will have to continue to be tireless: “We must change the situation in which we are not available to our children as we can and should be. They deserve it.”