Abstract

The national collective agreement for the employees of the Schools sector (over one million people: teachers and administrative employees) has been signed on the 16th of May 2003. In this essay the Author describes the "history" of bargaining and the main issues of the agreement itself. He focuses particularly on the opposition, which developed about the reform of relations between management and unions in the schools, and underlines how the relevance of this question in bargaining has stopped the parties from reaching more significant results as regards other important issues such as the organization of working time and the planning of teachers' career.