“The strike will take place on June 1, 2, 3 and 5, 2026,” says the strike notice, which Lusa had access to and which was sent to the AIMA management, the Deputy Secretary of State for the Presidency and Immigration, and the associations with cultural mediators who provide services at the agency.
According to the STM, the issue is the “persistence of structural problems that seriously affect workers and the functioning of services,” highlighting issues such as the “growing degradation of working conditions and the increased pressure on workers, without a corresponding reinforcement of human and technical resources” or the lack of a specific career path.
“The inability to respond quickly to regularisation processes, with a direct impact on both workers and foreign citizens,” and “concern about the use of ‘outsourcing’ in highly complex technical functions, jeopardising the quality of public service” are other concerns of the union, which laments “the deterioration of AIMA’s institutional image, with negative repercussions on the appreciation and recognition of professionals.”
For the workers, the government has not taken “effective measures to guarantee dignity, stability and appreciation of the functions of migration technicians,” and they lament the “non-compliance with commitments made” in the past.
The STM “reaffirms its availability for dialogue and for building solutions that respond to the identified problems, appealing for openness to negotiation on the part of the competent authorities.”
However, in recent days, messages have been sent to socio-cultural mediators and collaborators of AIMA who are linked to partner associations regarding “union meetings and absences from the workplace.”
In one of the messages sent to an association, which Lusa had access to, one of AIMA’s management units says that it has “received, from different union structures, communications regarding the holding of union meetings with sociocultural mediators, in various locations and facilities of this Agency”.
Emphasizing that these meetings may “result in absences of mediators from their respective workplaces and, on the other hand, that the employment relationship of the mediators assigned under the current protocol is with the assigning associations”, AIMA’s services promise to notify the employer “whenever a sociocultural mediator is absent from their workplace, regardless of the reason” for “the purposes that fall within the scope of the employment relationship between the employer and the mediator, as well as for the purposes of processing the monthly financial compensation”.