It's a real story. He has been working for twenty-one years as an intern in Elementary. The Basque Government finances the contract every summer and has to submit to the list of replacements in September to opt for another contract and another job. He has taught in forty schools (yes, forty!, and repeating some) and has helped society with three children. Parents and schools have very positively valued their teaching work. But it's provisional, interim, insecure at work. It's under the sword of Damocles.

There are hundreds and thousands of teachers in a similar situation in the Basque Country and in the Spanish state. This is allegal and involves legal fraud for abuse of periodicity or temporality. The institutions know this, but they do not correct the injustice. Most of the unions have this situation, but they have forgotten the interim teachers who live in education for many years and have no job security.

The only solution given to them is to forget all the years worked, to put aside all the accumulated merits and to present them to public oppositions with a limited number of places – where the curriculum and teaching experience are not specifically valued – to compete with younger candidates and who have probably had more time to prepare the tests. This is a fraudulent and unjust solution, because by applying the theory of probabilities there will always be a percentage of averages over ten years old that will be eliminated.

Fortunately, there is a trade union and an interim movement that offer support to seek a solution other than the opposition: to go to the courts. The Court of Justice of the European Union, faced with the abuse of temporality, has agreed to consolidate Fabio Rossato (C-494/17), an Italian education worker.

Furthermore, the Official Agency of the European Union has just published (15/10/2018) that the European Court of Justice will decide whether the call to OPE for jobs of public employees who are suffering from abuse of transitoriness (i.e. public opposition) is a solution adapted to European legislation. This resolution responds to a lawsuit filed in a court in Madrid by a group of SERMAS dentists, over 15 years old in the temporary post and without a call.

Without waiting for European justice to be bound up with judgments in favour of those who suffer from the abuse of temporality, the Basque Government can also offer a contract of employment (similar to that existing at university) in which it values work experience and teaching practice through a specific competition, and that the interim teachers who have been in education for more than ten years can stabilise their jobs on a fixed basis. The demand is fair.

* See Karmele Ikatzeta Zuriarrain, acting professor