Venezuelan teachers ask for better salaries
The education sector in Venezuela is in the midst of a crisis due to low salaries, which range from US$2 to US$8 per month. In the epicenter of hyperinflation and high prices, it is a real challenge for teachers to obtain enough to cover their basic needs, they have opted for the informal economy and to go to school two or three times a week.
The minimum wage, dissolved in a chronic inflation that in the last 12 months stands out at 550 %, according to the Venezuelan Observatory of Finance. Thus, the minimum wage went from being worth US$ 28 in March 2022, when the national government decreed the last increase, to little more than US$ 5 at present, which is not enough to cover any of the basic needs of the teacher or the public employee, since this situation extends to all employees of the public sector in general.
That is why we see teachers who neglect their work, constant absenteeism, which brings school dropouts to unsuspected levels and in all areas of education, primary, secondary and even university, a situation of precariousness in employees that lead them to perform the most unusual extra work to compensate for their low wages, while the national government plans to take a Venezuelan to the moon and it seems a fact worthy of astonishment, Venezuelan education impoverished and detached from the world reality.