The teachers’ movement against privatization of government schools in Punjab continues under the Grand Teachers Alliance Punjab. The Grand Teachers Alliance was recently formed by the leadership of various teachers’ organizations.
According to leaders, the purpose of forming this alliance was to create a joint platform to address school privatization and other issues facing teachers.
While the establishment of the Grand Teacher Alliance is a welcome step, there’s a need to extend this alliance beyond the provincial level to tehsil and district levels.
Currently, dozens of teachers’ organizations are working in the education sector. Due to the lack of union elections, the leadership that has been entrenched in these organizations for years neither has influence among the teacher community at the grassroots level nor maintains any active organizational structures. The majority of these union leaders are teachers in their final years of service and have become stagnant and inactive due to the long-term lack of organizational momentum and activity.
Due to the absence of dynamic union activities, newly recruited teachers haven’t been attracted to teachers’ organizations, creating a gap between old leadership and young teachers.
Recently, due to increasing economic pressures, growing anger among teachers led to the formation of AGEGA and during protests and sit-ins, young teachers have shown increased enthusiasm. Though limited in number, new young teachers have become active and joined existing organizations.
However, these young teachers also face difficulties due to the attitudes of old leadership, their inaction, and psychology of forcefully maintaining positions.
In this entire situation, while the rulers have intensified economic attacks and privatization efforts, and there’s severe anger against this among the teaching community, all these organizational issues and lack of strong organizational structures are hindering large-scale protests and strikes.
Undoubtedly, the biggest reason for these organizational weaknesses and inability to mount powerful resistance is the leadership’s lack of awareness of fighting ideologies and their defeatist psychology. It’s a fact that most of these leaders believe nothing can be achieved through struggle and no demand can be met if the ruling class doesn’t want it.
That’s why we see that in the November 2 protests across Punjab, special prayers were offered to soften the rulers’ hearts.
We believe this is because these leaderships don’t believe in their class’s power and are intimidated by the ruling class’s power. We believe these rulers’ hearts cannot be softened by prayers, nor can schools and jobs be saved through appeals for mercy.
If anyone can stop these rulers’ anti-employee measures, it’s the power of public sector workers themselves. To fully utilize this power, there’s a need to build strong organizational structures from the school and center level up to district and provincial levels.
History testifies that no power in the world can face organized working class power. Education sector workers run thousands of educational institutions through their labor, and if united, they can close all educational institutions through strikes and force these rulers to submit.
We believe current union leadership has a duty to immediately move toward organizing teachers and mobilize the teaching community to advance the struggle against privatization while connecting the public to this movement against educational institution privatization.
Additionally, there’s a need to mobilize millions of students studying in these government schools against privatization and, if needed, bring these students to the streets as well.
We need to understand clearly that stopping the ruling class’s current privatization attack is a matter of life and death for public sector workers.
If the government succeeds in this attack, saving the public education system and teachers’ jobs will become extremely difficult afterward. Every successful economic attack by the ruling class will increase their arrogance and power, leading to even bigger attacks.
Therefore, the need of the hour is to fight this battle with utmost seriousness and full courage, and move toward industrial actions and coordinated towards a general strike across the province while organizing teachers in strong organizational structures and committees.
