Oaxaca Teachers: Teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, have been on strike since May, 2006 for better salaries and learning conditions for their students. On October 12, 2007, at the PSC union hall, Raquel Cruz-Manzano, one of the strike leaders, spoke at an evening that was political (updates and analysis), cultural (art and crafts/music from Oaxaca) and culinary (home-cooked Mexican food). The striking teachers have inspired a mass movement in Oaxaca that has called for a new governor, a new constitution and a new respect for the public sphere. They have been met with repression and violence in a drama that is symptomatic of the world-wide assault on the public sector and working and poor people. Cruz-Manzano, and other speakers (Electa Arenal, Mike Menser and Herardo Renique), explained how this relates to us and the lessons that can we learned from the courageous example of the Oaxaca teachers.  Click here for photo gallery of the 10/12/07 event  and here for AFT and PSC resolutions on Oaxaca.

---

• Click here to send emails asking that our union brothers and sisters in Colombia be protected in the face of ongoing death threats.

• Click here for November '04 bulletin of the International Committee.

GLOBALIZATION, PRIVATIZATION, WAR: IN DEFENSE OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IN THE AMERICAS.  The PSC has produced a pamphlet of the proceedings of its October, 2002 conference -- Globalization, Privatization, War: In Defense of Public Education in the Americas.  The pamphlet connects the dots between attacks on public education and globalization, privatization and war.  Click below to read the pamphlet:

• As a Word document
• As a PDF document*

We are at war in a world where there is more than one war going on. Besides the regional wars of bombs and blood, there is a global war on people’s needs. We feel it even here, in the richest country on the planet.

This war on us is taking the form of an assault on the public delivery of services such as health and education, voraciously privatizing them wherever possible. It is driven by neo-liberal economic schemes to increase profits and make working people pay the cost. As tax cuts for the rich limit resources for the poor, public universities like the City University of New York (CUNY) are forced to seek private sponsors and to outsource nearly everything from food to faculty.

From the Introduction

...an important premise of the conference and the articles in this pamphlet is that we cannot understand our own situation, right here in New York, here at CUNY—even at the bargaining table—without seeing ourselves as part of a larger political unit. Think of the way the weather map we know from the newspaper and the TV news reinforces national myopia: weather somehow stops at the US border, Canada and Mexico are voids. This conference used a different map, drawing deeply on the knowledge and history of scholars from Mexican and Canadian universities, as well as the US....  To fight for better contracts, more state funding for CUNY or greater access to education without an understanding of global politics is to go into battle willfully blind.

From the Preface by PSC
President, Barbara Bowen

*You will need an Acrobat PDF reader to view a PDF document.  Click HERE for a free download (Adobe Products Website)