#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #BRAZIL #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) Brazil, luta fob: Building the Autonomous Federation of Education Workers (FATE) - FATE founding manifesto, December 2021. (ca, de, it, fr, pt)[machine translation]

 Contact: fate-nac@protonmail.com ---- We, education workers, understand that the

current national situation demands from us a more forceful and combative
political organization to face the various attacks on the education offered to
the people and, by extension, the historical and structural problems of Brazilian
education: the scrapping of infrastructure of educational institutions
accompanied by the absence of a significant financing policy for the sector; the
devaluation and precariousness of the working conditions of all education
workers; the abandonment and unsatisfactory conditions of study, permanence and
reception for the children of workers and the permanent refusal, government after
government, to expand spaces for effective participation of the school community
in school management

The international and national situation is characterized by the deepening of
inequalities between rich and poor and the impoverishment of workers in general.
The loss of labor rights and social security, the imposition of increasingly
precarious occupations with low wages and excessive working hours, or even
informality are the project of employers and political leaders. Through the
repression of the people, especially the workers who live in the slums and
outskirts and in the fields and social movements, they intend to prevent us from
organizing and resisting, wanting to silence us. They promote a veritable
genocide of blacks, quilombolas and indigenous people and the murder of political
activists; since the Amnesty Law in 1979, 1,345 people have been killed for
political reasons in the country.

The attacks of the powerful don't stop there. They also aim at removing social
rights, such as education and public health, releasing the State from
guaranteeing their access to the people and privatizing these services. In this
way, and in the specific case of education, they guarantee the transfer of public
resources destined for this purpose and collected through the sweat of the worker
to large entrepreneurs, owners of universities and networks of private schools,
which do not are committed to an education for the people. The interest is to
impose an education to meet only the demands of the bosses, as the current reform
of secondary education intends to guarantee. As if the flawed and tricky
character characteristic of this reform, as well as its nebulous articulation
with the FUNDEB and LDB laws, were not enough,it is a shameless offense to
maintain before the school community and Brazilian society as a whole that the
problem of this segment of education would be solved with a simple curricular
reform, hitherto not done. This reductionism, this emphasis on the curricular
issue as a safe way to solve the problem of school dropout, the problem of
students' lack of interest, lack of identity and lack of dialogue with
experiences of our time, hides the real purpose of the reform: expanding the
transfer of public resources to the private sector and making public education
for the people cheaper. Unlinking the problems of secondary education from the
country's socioeconomic reality will only increase the precariousness of life and
social inequality,it will only consist of one more attack on the dignity of the
majority of Brazilians dependent on public schools.

With the crisis in the states and municipalities and the delay in the payment of
wages, this situation worsened, leaving the worker in a situation of penury and
illness. Basic working and studying conditions are lacking (school meals and poor
food quality; overcrowded, hot classrooms without adequate ventilation; buildings
falling apart; there is a lack of books, pilots, blackboards, paper and desks),
but there is no lack of political repression and moral harassment by employers on
workers and students, especially those who denounce and organize themselves
politically.

Outsourced education workers (cleaning, surveillance, general, maintenance and
administrative services, inspectors, daycare assistants and porters), in addition
to being more subject to low wages and bullying practices and political
repression, have been suffering for a longer time with constant interruptions and
delays in the payment of salaries, with the absence of payment due to social
benefits, with the lack of PPE Protective Equipment equipment and the change of
outsourced companies. The intention to hire teachers via Social Organizations, as
is currently the case in the health area, is also a facet of this dismantling of
public education. As a result, an increasing number of education workers will be
subjected to precarious working conditions,in addition to causing the reduction
of public tenders and the total disruption of teaching careers.

The pandemic and the social crisis amplified the massacre and humiliation on
education workers. Governments and employers took the opportunity to expand
privatization, withdraw labor rights and increase cuts in education. In schools
and other educational institutions, we have had an increase in temporary and
outsourced work, layoffs and salary reductions, role deviation, hungry students,
broken families, lack of materials and infrastructure, authoritarianism and
militarization of institutions, illness and death of workers (as) and students.
The adoption of so-called "remote education" during the pandemic was a disaster
and only widened inequalities in education. It was applied from top to bottom,
meeting the interests of the State and Capital, without guaranteeing the basic
material conditions for its realization,such as the provision of adequate work
and study materials (computers, internet, etc.) and training for a new teaching
and learning model. Not to mention that our data and that of the students ended
up in the hands of BIG TECH.

Workers have been showing their potential for struggle and organization in
different strike movements in recent years. However, the way in which the current
education unions are organized and how the leaders conduct the struggle have led
us to reduced achievements and the weakening of the union itself. There is no
union in the country that aggregates all education workers from the janitor to
the teacher or pedagogue, including the different public and private education
networks. For example, some national education unions from the same education
network only represent teachers, excluding the most precarious sectors (the
outsourced) from the struggle, which are subject to hideous unions and who only
wanted to snatch the union tax.

The conduct of the political struggle has been the most serious obstacle to the
advancement of the union organization of education workers and in general. In
these organizations, it is most common for trade unionists to participate in
tripartite forums with governments and businessmen, to make arrangements with
political leaders or employers, aiming at electoral interests, disputing
political positions via elections and seeking to obtain personal advantages,
forgetting the real demands of the ) workers. Without greater resistance to the
imposition of the powerful and bosses, they accept lowered agendas and conciliate
interests. The conquest of positions in the State has priority over the struggle
of workers, making the role of unions for emancipation secondary. They seek to
limit or even prevent the more effective and autonomous participation of
workers,generating more distrust and preventing solidarity networks from forming
by workplace. More concerned with maintaining control of workers, they prevent
the formation of an autonomous and grassroots action, from the bottom up. As a
consequence, there is a disbelief and demobilization of the struggles.

Breaking with this reformist form of trade union, the Oppositions affiliated to
FOB, the Opposition of Class Resistance (ORC) and Aliança Classista Sindical
(ACS) ceased to be just oppositions and became the education sections of the
Autonomous General Unions of the FOB. Now, this education sector proposes the
construction of the Autonomous Education Unions and the national construction of
the Autonomous Federation of Education Workers (FATE) affiliated to FOB. Thus, it
proposes the task of organizing all workers in the field of education, regardless
of the education network. The policy of opposition to Pelego unionism will be
maintained and strengthened in the coming years, but now with the strategic
objective of building new mass organizations.Each section of FATE will certainly
find itself in different stages of construction and in different realities, which
is why we call on all bases, collectives, oppositions and combative leaderships
spread throughout Brazil to join this common objective and this historic task: to
build the Autonomous Federation of Education Workers!

In basic education, there are more than 2 million workers. At universities,
380,000 and as daycare assistants approximately 206,000. With this category,
there is a real possibility of organizing vindication movements with national
reach and local permeability. For this, unions cannot restrict themselves to
immediate and corporate struggles, it is necessary to break with the limits of
partial struggles and build the joint struggle of the working class against the
capitalist system. This is the aim of Revolutionary Syndicalism.

The current context demands a new form of union organization, different from the
current one, reformist, corporatist, bureaucratic, corrupt and linked to the
State. Let's build an organization of all education workers, committed to our
struggles and demands, organized by workplace and autonomous. Only through the
self-organization of education workers can we resist, stop neoliberal reforms and
advance in the conquest of rights.

For a unionism committed to a project of liberation from economic exploitation
and submission, we defend:

- Public services, especially education, aimed at meeting the needs of the
people. Against the precariousness and privatization of public services. Against
OS and outsourcing. End of outsourcing with the incorporation of all functions
and workers to the public service staff;

- Free admission of the people to public universities. Against the dismantling
and privatization of universities; Against the monthly fee and against paid
courses. Defense of a popular university;

- Emancipatory education, aimed at raising awareness and organizing the people.
Defense of freedom of educational practices, against the criminalization of
workers against academic obscurantism and all forms of harassment and persecution

Our tasks are:

- Build and call a general strike from the base, from the outside and against the
union bureaucracies, adopting insurrectionary tactics, direct action, sabotage,
the stoppage of production, services and the circulation of goods to stop
neoliberal attacks, anti-war reforms -people, the genocide of black people in the
favelas and peripheries, and facing the government on duty elected to manage
neoliberal barbarism;

- Build the people's congress, based on popular assemblies and delegates elected
by grassroots organizations of the people, as an instrument of counter-power and
in opposition to the reactionary national congress and other constitutedpowers,
and an instance of building the Brazilian Revolution, Socialism and the People's
Self-Government.

https://lutafob.org/9359/
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