In the end, the education ministry surrendered to the teaching unions over the evaluation system, the bill for which it had submitted to the House for approval. As expected, the political parties, led by the president of the education committee, Pavlos Mylonas, unquestioningly sided with the unions. There are, after all, parliamentary elections next year and no party (and no deputy) would want to fall foul of unions representing tens of thousands of voters. The unions are supported, as a matter of principle, by the parties, even when they are being totally unreasonable.

Education Minister Athena Michaelidou put a brave face to the humiliation of giving in to the unions’ blackmail, claiming at a House education committee meeting on Wednesday that she was satisfied with this outcome. Having declared there was no scope for more negotiations with the unions and submitted the bill to House for approval, the minister will now start a new round of negotiations, via the House education committee. The latter will receive counter proposals from the unions and forward them to the education minister so there could be more talks. Unions had threatened strikes if there was no dialogue.

In Cyprus’ union ruled public sector the workers have the right to decide how their work would be evaluated, while the employer (the state) must have minimal say in the matter. Union bosses expressed some ludicrous objections to the ministry’s proposed scheme, the most absurd being their objection to teachers being evaluated by the head teacher! It is like a private business barring its CEO from evaluating an employee’s job performance, because the employees object.

The unions seem to have two objectives. The first is to delay the introduction of the new system, which was meant to come into force at the start of the new school year.  The second is to make the evaluation system as ineffective and unreliable as possible so it does not penalize indolent, poor performing union members.

Some delay has already been achieved, with the minister optimistically expressing the hope the evaluation system would be introduced in January, so as to avoid a €60m fine that would be imposed by the European Commission for the failure to meet the deadline set by the recovery and resilience plan. Once Michaelidou agreed to more dialogue there is no guarantee there could be agreement by the end of this year, as the union bosses have great expertise in a big range of delaying tactics. In fact, it would be no surprise if the evaluation system became the subject of never-ending negotiations.

What a shame the minister, who had stood up to the unions and had become the target of abusive comments was forced to back down in the end, because everyone turned against her, including her government which has a policy of pandering to the unions.