Action committee condemns threats by Sri Lankan president against teachers
We, as members of the Teachers, Students and Parents Action Committee in Defence of Free Education (TSPAC), condemn the threats and reprisals by President Ranil Wickremesinghe against more than 250,000 teachers, school principals and trainers.
Wickremesinghe, who is completely opposed to our demands for a salary increase, a reduction in the cost of student materials and an increase in government spending on public education, made his latest threat on July 3 at a meeting of thousands of educators in Colombo.
“No one should, directly or indirectly, disrupt school classes between 7:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. I have asked the Attorney General to propose measures in this regard,” he said, claiming the teachers’ strikes were “unjustified.”
Wickremesinghe also said, “Given the economic situation in the country, further increases are not possible” as teachers’ salaries were increased in 2022 and all government employees recently received an allowance of 10,000 rupees ($32.84).
In his effort to divide the teaching profession across ethnic lines, he played the communal card, declaring: “There were no strikes in Tamil and Muslim schools… (but) there were disturbances in Sinhala-medium schools.”
Wickremesinghe’s latest threats followed a brutal police attack on tens of thousands of striking teachers demonstrating in Colombo on June 26 to demand a pay rise. The government-instigated attack left dozens of teachers injured, including one with serious eye injuries.
The next day, at a meeting with the chief Buddhist prelate of the Asgiriya chapter, Wickremesinghe threatened to place education under the government’s draconian Essential Public Services Act (EPSA). This repressive law prohibits any industrial action and violations are punishable by harsh prison sentences, heavy fines and suspension from employment.
We call on all sections of the working class to condemn Wickremesinghe’s threats against teachers and to see them as an attack on the entire working class, which is currently caught up in a struggle for wages and basic rights.
The Wickremesinghe government recently declared the health, electricity and petroleum sectors as essential services. Railways and other public transport are also considered essential services.
Wickremesinghe gives cynical lectures to educators about how they should teach, what their responsibilities are and how they should behave. What arrogance! Teachers, like all sections of the working class and the poor, are struggling desperately to make ends meet.
In 2022, after a 100-day teachers’ strike, the then government of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse granted teachers only one-third of their salary demands, a meager increase – from Rs 3,000 to Rs 15,000 – depending on the grade. It promised to pay the remaining two-thirds over the next two years, a promise that was ignored.
Faced with growing anger among the working class over soaring inflation and massive cuts in living standards, Wickremesinghe approved a monthly allowance of Rs 10,000 for civil servants in January. On this basis, he now claims that teachers and the rest of the working class are now in a kind of self-sufficient state. What a travesty!
A survey by the state Census and Statistics Department earlier this year found that an individual needs a minimum monthly income of Rs 16,619 to meet basic needs, while a family of five needs at least Rs 85,000.
After deducting loan repayments, teachers are left with little net salary, so many of them have to give private lessons or take on other jobs to make a living. Around 5,000 teachers gave up their jobs last year because of the low salaries.
While Wickremesinghe feigns compassion for the students and insists that they need continuous education, his government has drastically worsened the situation of the students.
The cost of basic school materials such as books and other necessities such as shoes and school bags has doubled or in some cases tripled in recent years, forcing children from poor families to drop out of school. Government subsidies are so low that school administrations are forced to ask parents to cover the costs of building renovations and other necessities.
This is the reality faced by teachers, students and parents, a situation created by Wickremesinghe’s brutal implementation of the IMF austerity program. In line with these social attacks, the government is raking in huge revenues by raising taxes, restructuring and privatizing state institutions and cutting funding for vital services such as education and health.
And for what? To pay off huge foreign debts and increase the profits of local and international investors, while doing nothing to increase teachers’ salaries.
Just as free public health care is now under threat, free public education is also under threat. Attacks on these vital social services have intensified since the early 1980s, starting under the government of President JR Jayawardene and its implementation of the “open market economy” policies advocated by the IMF and World Bank.
Wickremesinghe, who was Education Minister under Jayawardene, had launched plans to privatise public education with his 1981 White Paper on Education. It was a blueprint for the systematic destruction of free public education, a right won by the working class through decades of struggle.
Massive resistance from workers, teachers and students prevented Wickremesinghe from implementing all the proposals in his White Paper, but successive governments in Colombo have implemented many of them. Sri Lanka has seen an explosion of local and foreign private schools, private universities affiliated to foreign universities and the introduction of fee-paying courses in state universities.
Colombo has also drastically cut funding for public education, with the annual budget falling from four percent of GDP in 1981 to 2.1 percent in 2010. In the following decade, this amount fell to just 1.2 percent of GDP.
The teachers’ union bureaucracies share responsibility for these ongoing attacks. Time and again, they have acknowledged the crisis of successive governments and abandoned the defense of public education.
In 2022, leaders of the Ceylon Teachers Union (CTU), the Ceylon Teacher Services Union (CTSU), controlled by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, and the United Teacher Services Unions, affiliated to the pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party, held high-level discussions with then Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse on teachers’ salary demands.
They accepted Rajapakse’s claim that the government had no money because the country’s economic crisis had been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and agreed to a salary increase that was below the rate of inflation. Wickremesinghe is now making the same claim, telling teachers they must wait for the economy to recover through austerity measures imposed by the IMF.
The leaders of the CTU, CSTU and others claim that the government can be pressured to meet the teachers’ demands. But since Wickremesinghe became President, many protests have been organised on the basis of this false claim, including by other sections of the working class. And all of them have been futile.
The teachers’ union, along with other public sector unions, has called for a sick leave protest today to “put renewed pressure” on the government. The union bureaucrats are falsely claiming that the upcoming presidential election and other votes will force the government to meet their demands.
In response to Wickremesinghe’s threats, the leaders of the CTU and CSTU thundered: “We are not afraid of such threats.” This empty bluster will not stop the government, which is determined to implement all the IMF’s demands.
Teachers, students and parents need a real program to fight for their legitimate demands for higher wages, end the economic burden on parents, and defend and improve free public education.
TPSAC insists that the struggle for these demands cannot be carried out if it is in the hands of the unions, which are pro-capitalist organizations. This is the essential political lesson of past and present struggles.
We demand the formation of independent action committees of teachers, parents and students to take this struggle forward and the allocation of billions of rupees to defend and improve free public education and decent salaries for all education workers.
This can only be achieved as part of a broader political struggle against the government’s austerity measures. That is why we support the call for a general political strike by the working class to defeat the government’s IMF demands, including the repayment of foreign debt and the strengthening of the profit system.
Teachers and all working people must say: “We are not responsible for your crisis, which is part of the global capitalist crisis,” and take up the struggle for a workers’ and peasants’ government based on a socialist and internationalist program.
TSPAC is hosting an online meeting on July 11 at 7pm to discuss this perspective and invite your participation. Please register here to attend the meeting.
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