27/09/2018
To PAME (Front for the Struggle of All Workers) in Greece
Comrades,
The World Federation of Teachers Unions FISE, member of WFTU takes part in today’s massive action of teachers in primary and secondary education, that takes place in Athens.
We agree and support the requests for the hiring of 25,000 replacement-teachers, for stable working places with full rights for all teachers and educators. We agree and support the requests for exclusively public and free of any charges education, which has to fulfill the needs of all pupils, respect the rights of teachers and covers the need of the working class for modern education.
In Germany, the schools started with 40,000 teachers missing and with 1 million children below their relative poverty threshold, who cannot even buy a notebook for their classes. In India, millions of teachers are on strike, demanding a monthly paycheck, as they now work as concessionaires and get paid in the end of the project, if they get paid!!!
In Guinea, in Africa, 2 teachers were killed by the bullets of policemen during their last strike, which lasted one month, but resulted with a 40% raise of their wages.
In Sri Lanca there are schools without electricity or toilettes, where even elementary graduates work as teachers, if they can prove they can write and read. Of course there are also modern schools, where teachers have to distribute to their pupils pills, made by pharmaceutical companies, who by their cooperation with the government conduct their official research that way.
In London there have been strikes, as 1,000 pupils with special needs are being excluded from the educational system, due to a shortage in teachers. In Scotland, strikes have been announced in November, regarding the wages and the working conditions.
In Guinea, for the first time in the last 24 years, teachers strike. In Washington, Virginia, Arizona, Oclahoma, Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, in all the continents teachers face measures against education and the workers, that are being taken by the governments, so that they can serve the capitalist economy and the needs of the monopolies and the international companies.
The same tactic of cut-downs in education, of spreading the poorly paid flexible working hours and of the “recycling” of unemployment has been the path of SYRIZA, following the steps of ND, Change Movement (former PASOK) and all the parties, that defend and apply the directions of the EU and the OECD. These parties keep in their agendas the development congresses for investments, which are being based on the work of teachers without any rights or permanent working places, of teachers wandering from school to school and from island to island, in order to secure even 4 teaching hours per week.
The answer to this spreaded attack, that teachers all over the world face, is the one you are giving here and now; it is the same answer that teachers in Nepal voiced yesterday and many more who get out on the streets, standing against these policies, which demand the exploitation of man by man. Against the tactics of the trade unions of ETUCE and the International Education, who organize seminars about the organization and application of such development policies with the said characteristics.
The only way for us, for the World Federation of Teachers Unions is the organization and the solidarity to the struggles of the world movement, so that we can defend the rights of teachers, the rights of the global working class, together with PAME, FISE and WFTU.
THE SECRETARIAT
