(We yield this space to the statement of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers due to its timeliness. Today is World Teachers Day. – Ed.)
THE 200,000-strong Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) Philippines dedicates the 53rd World Teachers Day commemoration to the unified struggle of all rank-and-file government employees for decent wages, humane working conditions, and respect for democratic rights.
Today, we link arms with nurses, health workers, office employees, and field workers in the public sector as we censure the government’s partiality to its wars and its war machinery, at the expense of delivering basic services to the people and ensuring the welfare of its own civilian workers.
As the nation honors today the overworked and underpaid teachers being our everyday heroes, ACT wishes to remind everyone that the teachers’ dire situation is but a part and reflection of the crisis that haunts all government workers and the nation as a whole. We all suffer with measly wages that do not give justice to our dedicated service nor provide the barest of our families’ needs. We whimper with every strike of price hike, tax imposition, and budget cut on social services, which are dictated by policies that adhere to market-oriented governance. This is the reason why, however timely and justified substantially raising teachers’ salaries is, and despite the overwhelming clamor for such, the Duterte administration is unflinching with its scant salary increase allocation in the 2020 budget.
Deprivation of decent standards of living naturally pushes ordinary citizens to organize themselves and assert their rights. But, in defense of policies that perpetuates social injustice, the government chooses to repress our constitutional rights to free expression, association, and self-organization. Our legitimate unions are red-tagged and vilified, our members profiled, and our leaders harassed and persecuted.
The government falsely rings alarm by claiming that the bureaucracy was “infiltrated by insurgents” through the unions in the public sector. We are legitimate government workers, organized in our lawful unions, asserting our constitutionally-protected rights.
These common experiences of government workers of economic hardships and political repression call for public sector employees to unite and struggle together. We struggle for decent and living wages, humane working conditions, and genuine delivery of services to the people.
As teachers, it is our moral obligation to join this struggle not only for ourselves, but more importantly to uphold the objectives of education — to promote human rights, social justice, democracy, just and lasting peace, and genuine national development. On World Teachers Day, we commit to pursuing these principles from our classrooms to the streets.
