YEREVAN. – Employees of the Ministry of Culture of Armenia are starting a labor strike, as of Friday.

They are demonstrating outside the ministry building and protesting the government decision on dissolving the Ministry of Culture and joining part of it to the Ministry of Education and Science and the other part—to the Ministry of Urban Development.

The demonstrators noted that if there are too many ministries in Armenia, let them study and try to resolve this problem, but this has nothing to do with the main functions of the Ministry of Culture.

As a result of reorganization of the Armenian government structure, the number of ministries is expected to be reduced from 17 to 12.