On Strike

The teachers voted in favour of a strike on Tuesday, but for whatever bureaucratical/political reasons, the strike won’t be official until it’s voted on again during a referendum early this next week, a referendum some are calling illegal, because the strike has already been decided. It’s a strange situation – some teachers are on strike at the university, but not all of them, I went to class today as normal, and my teacher explained to us his reasons for being against the strike, which sounded pretty legitimate (even though I could only understand half of what he said – he’s from the South of Brazil and has a very different accent). He explained how the teachers on strike aren’t even sure of what they want, and that it doesn’t make sense for us students to support us because in the end it will only end up hurting us as students. But later this afternoon I went to the teacher’s of the Geosciences department’s meeting about the strike (students were allowed to attend) and heard a completely different side. One of the teacher’s was absolutely vicious – he went on and on about how the teachers against the strike are our internal enemies in the school, how they are dishonest (and he called them a bunch of other things I didn’t understand) and how they are telling the students in the class that there is no strike even though there is one. He was so extreme, talking about how these people knew who they were and if there was one here now he would point his finger in their face. I think the most awful thing is that his speech was completely focused on being against the other teachers, which is besides the whole point, and when he finished half the students were clapping and cheering, while the other half just looked a bit shocked. My teacher showed up about thirty minutes later when someone else was speaking, and their was this awful tension that filled the room because he was the only teacher there against the strike. Several of the teachers did make good points however, about their legitimate reasons for being on strike. One of them was that the government promised them a 4% increase in March and still hasn’t paid, and another was something to do with their retirement benefits that the government was cutting. Also they wanted a higher salary (in their main slogan it says 22.2%, which is huge – I’m not so sure why they chose that number). Currently they make around 3500$ to 7000$ (Canadian) per month, depending on their background and experience. It’s not that bad of a salary, but they say that compared to other teachers at private schools, or in industry, it’s not very much and that’s why they have such a hard time finding teachers for certain classes. There are other reasons too: better infrastructure, (such as air conditioning), etc. The meeting lasted about three hours but I think only about 30 minutes of it was actually informative. So for now I will be going to my classes as usual, but I think all of the students are in a really uncertain place right now as most likely next week classes will no longer be in session – and the strike will very likely last at least a month, according to many.