Unions end nationwide education strike in Brazil
Earlier this week, teachers and staff unions at Brazilian federal institutions and universities ended a strike against the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers’ Party – PT) for better wages, working conditions and infrastructure. Staff had been on strike since March 11, while teachers began their strike on April 15. It was the largest strike against the Lula government since it took office early last year.
From the beginning, the unions refused to lead a common struggle against the Lula government. They began the strikes on separate days, isolating this struggle from other sectors of federal employees, such as environmental personnel and employees of the National Social Security Institute, who are also striking against the Lula government’s austerity policies. During the strike by federal education authorities, teachers in numerous state education systems also carried out work stoppages and strikes against the ongoing attacks on public education.
In this sense, the unions are continuing the treacherous role they played throughout the government of fascist President Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022). After helping to isolate student struggles against Bolsonaro’s numerous attacks on universities and channel them into Lula’s election in 2022, they are now covering the new pro-capitalist PT government’s attacks on education and social services.
Many rank-and-file teachers were determined to continue the strike, refusing to accept the impasse of fruitless negotiations with the Lula government into which the National Union of Higher Education Teachers (ANDES) brought the strike movement. Twenty of the 55 union sections of ANDES, controlled by Moreno and Pabloite tendencies of the pseudo-left Party for Socialism and Freedom (PSOL) and the PT itself, decided to continue the strike.
ANDES’ cynical joy at the end of the strike contrasts with the attacks that the Lula government attracted during the strike. On its website, ANDES wrote that the Lula government acted “disrespectfully” and “contemptuously” towards the strike movement during the strike, since it “serves the interests of rentier and financial capital” and “its anti-democratic, essentially anti-union attitude towards the trade union movement is one of its fundamental characteristics.”
ANDES and SINASEFE, the union for staff and teaching staff at state institutes that offer courses from high school to postgraduate, have accepted the Lula government’s slimmed-down proposal, which includes a wage freeze this year and a total increase of up to 14 percent in 2025 and 2026. Since 2016, real wage losses have amounted to 39 percent for teachers and 53 percent for federal education employees.
These figures contrast with the salary increase of up to 27 percent that the Lula government has offered for this and the next two years to the Federal Police and the Federal Highway Police, which are an essential basis for Bolsonarism.
Similarly, Defense Minister José Múcio Monteiro is trying to re-establish ties with the Brazilian armed forces that were behind Bolsonaro’s January 8 coup attempt and “close” the US-backed military coup of 1964. Behind the scenes, he is working to increase the defense budget to 2 percent of GDP. Finance Minister Fernando Haddad is simultaneously considering touching constitutional minimum spending on health and education and decoupling pension increases from minimum wage increases in order to meet Lula’s “new fiscal framework” and his “zero deficit” goal this year.
To end the strike movement, the Lula government announced on June 10 that it would invest 5.5 billion reals ($1 billion) in stalled construction projects and the expansion of federal institutions and universities. But as the daily S. Paulo newspaper As has been reported, these funds had already been earmarked since the middle of last year. The only new investment announced was for the precarious university hospitals (250 million reais, or $46 million), whose workers have been absent several times this year and staged a national strike in early May.
However, this amount is far from enough to reverse the cuts in education that began during the PT government of President Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016) and were exacerbated under the governments of Michel Temer (2016-2018) and Bolsonaro. This year, according to FolhaThe Brazilian federal budget for education and science is barely half of what it was in 2014.
In an interview with the Metropolises On the University of Brasília website, the dean of the University of Brasília, Márcia Abrahão, stated earlier this month: “We (deans) are asking for a budget of 8.5 billion reais ($1.6 billion) for 2024, but it is 6.1 billion reais ($1.1 billion). And in 2023 it was 6.2 billion reais ($1.2 billion). So we have not even reached 2023.” She also pointed out that it is possible that universities will not have enough money to cover their basic expenses by the end of the year.
The Lula government also took advantage of the union bureaucracy in the PT-controlled federation of nationwide university unions, PROIFES, which brings together only six of the 69 nationwide university unions. In late May, the PROIFES leadership signed an agreement with the Lula government that was rejected by lecturers at five nationwide universities and then annulled by the federal courts because it was not registered as a union.
The PT’s attacks on education are not limited to the federal level. In the northeastern state of Ceará, where the PT has governed since 2015 and implemented pro-business programs in primary education that have been welcomed by Brazil’s most important think tanks on business education, last week teachers at the three state universities ended a strike that began in early April for better salaries and the hiring of additional teachers.
In early April, the PT governor of Ceará, Elmano de Freitas, also used the support of the PT-controlled trade union APEOC, the Maoist Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) and the Morenoist Resistance PSOL’s tendency to prevent the start of a strike that was threatening to get out of hand of the union bureaucracy. Outraged teachers tried to reverse the decision and were beaten up by the union bureaucrats, who then falsely accused them of being “criminals” and “fascists”.
At the state university of Piauí, another PT-governed state in the northeast, teachers and students went on strike for more than two months earlier this year for better wages and working and teaching conditions. PT governor Rafael Fonteles cut the wages of the striking teachers and had the strike declared illegal by the courts.
The nationwide education strike led to massive work stoppages and strikes by teachers in numerous Brazilian states against the attacks on public education. The most significant was a protest by teachers in the southern state of Paraná against the planned privatization of the state school administration, which was brutally suppressed by the military police in early June. During the strike that was initiated in response, the far-right governor Ratinho Jr. allied himself with the bourgeois judiciary to declare the strike illegal and threatened to arrest the union leader if the strike continued.
This powerful movement was also ignored by ANDES and SINASEFE, the latter of which includes teachers and employees of the state’s basic education system. One of their demands during the strike was the repeal of the 2016 pro-corporate high school reform, which is also widely supported by teachers and students in state schools, who have staged numerous walkouts and strikes since last year.
But since Lula took office, the opposite of what teachers want has been observed. Education Minister Camilo Santana, a former governor of Ceará and a pro-business advocate in education, defended minor changes to the school reform that in no way alter its pro-business core or mitigate the attack on Brazil’s public education system that it represents.
Last week, when the Brazilian Senate passed a bill amending high school reform, which is now being debated in the House of Representatives, the unions controlled by PT and PSOL refused to mobilize teachers, fearing that the movement could merge with the nationwide education strike against the Lula government and slip out of their control.
The most notable example of this is the state legislator and president of the São Paulo Teachers’ Union (APEOESP), Teatcher Bebel, who praised on Facebook the “important changes in secondary education” in the bill passed by the Senate. She said that “it is not a dream law” but “with a lot of effort we are restoring dignity to Brazilian education.”
In the face of APEOESP’s lies about fighting to reverse the high school reform and the recent betrayal of the nationwide education strike against the Lula government, one can at least say: What a fraud!
Early last year, the WSWS analyzed the formation of the Lula government’s Ministry of Education (MEC) and wrote:
The decisions of the Lula government in the MEC and the other ministries … express the pro-capitalist character of the PT and its supporters, including the PSOL and the unions. Teachers, students and the Brazilian working class must immediately prepare for a struggle against this trend.
A year and a half after Lula took office, these words have come true. Brazil’s teachers must break the illusion, spread by the pseudo-left and the unions, that the Lula government can be put under pressure. They must form independent grassroots committees to unite the struggles at the national and international level on the basis of a socialist program that guarantees free, quality public education from kindergarten to university.
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