São Paulo’s municipal teachers strike grows despite union sabotage
On Wednesday, the strike by the nearly 60,000 municipal teachers in São Paulo ended its first week. The return of students to the classrooms, scheduled for Monday, was answered by educators with the expansion of the strike, bypassing the unions’ efforts to sabotage their struggle.
A survey by rank-and-file teachers on WhatsApp groups indicates that the strike has spread to hundreds of schools in the city, preventing many of them from reopening. Another 530 municipal schools had the resumption of classes postponed due to the lack of a minimum number of cleaning personnel, exposing the precarious conditions of the educational system and the incompetence of the São Paulo City Hall administration.
Stop reopening of schools in São Paulo and throughout Brazil!
Amid the explosive growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil and throughout the world, Brazilian state governments are forcing their schools to reopen. A powerful wave of opposition to this homicidal policy of the ruling class is growing among Brazilian educators, with strikes being called in different parts of the country.
The state of São Paulo, the most populous and most affected by the virus, is leading the national campaign to reopen schools. This Monday, February 1, on-site classes were resumed in private schools. The state’s public school network is set to reopen for students on February 8. On-site planning meetings have already begun.
Collusion with the far right is not unique to US Republicans Across the world, once-respectable conservative politicians are enabling extremist voices. How dismal it is to see the rush of Republicans distancing themselves from Donald Trump; discovering their principles not two weeks before the end of a four-year presidency that has made a mockery of everything their country and party are meant to hold dear. The images at the Capitol that prompted them to do so may well come to define Trump’s term, summing up the unhinged extremism of the man in the White House and his most die-hard supporters. Yet they will tell an incomplete story. Just as central a place in histories of the Trump disaster must be reserved for those same, once-respectable conservative politicians who have enabled the president to whip up the chaos they now, finally, deign to criticise: the Lindsay Grahams, the Mitch McConnells, the Mike Pences, the Marco Rubios