Speech of Chrisoula Lampoudi at the Presidential Council Meeting in Vietnam on March 4-5, 2025
Dear comrades,
On behalf of the World Federation of Teachers’ Unions FISE, we welcome the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour and thank them for organizing the meeting and for their hospitality. We express our thanks to the WFTU secretariat for the invitation and the opportunity to convey the situation in the education sector, the problems of teachers and the need to emphasize the 20th FISE Congress that will be held on April, 5-6 2025 in Rabat, Morocco.
We all know that education is a necessary and useful tool, both for the working class and for the class that today controls the wealth produced by our class, with the difference that for the working class it is treated as a social good, while for the masters of the monopolies and multinationals it is treated as a commercial product.
We are fighting for all working class throughout the world to have free access to education without discrimination and exclusion. Our opponents seek to manipulate education, teachers, students, so as to form subservient consciences, to produce cheap flexible labour, specialized in the sectors determined by capitalist profit and benefit, and all this combined with as little state expenditure as possible.
On all continents, in many countries education is a boiling pot. Teachers, workers, pupils, students are under increasing pressure to accept measures such as privatization, reduced costs of the provided education, flexible forms of employment, the delay in payment of accrued wages, directed research, the falsification of historical and scientific truth and others. The reactions of Kurdish teachers in Iraq to the payment of their salaries are well known, the protests in Argentina, in Greece for the non-privatization of universities, in France for social security rights, in Chicago for funding, in Morocco for freedom of trade unionism, and if I go on the list would be too long.
The privatization of education is progressing from country to country like a domino effect. Schools and universities are being thrown into the jaws of the multinationals. They generalize evaluation in order to cut funds and reduce the number of teachers; they ban trade unionism and strikes. We have examples of authoritarianism, terrorism, arrests in almost all the major demonstrations where hard fights are conducted by the education unions, sometimes individually and sometimes in coordination with the whole labour and student movement.
Of course, it is not my intention to list the difficulties faced by the teachers’ sector, but simply to stress that education instead to be treated as a social good that should be given generously, equally and free to all the people, it is treated as a commercial product. Historical and scientific truth is distorted and controlled, the content of education and the education as a whole is adapted and follows the rules of profitability defined by the OECD and is also used as a mechanism for the reproduction of capitalist ideology, that systematically works for the profits and domination of the monopolies and multinationals. This explains why most universities now finance research and programs that serve intra-imperialist oppositions and competitions and not the improvement of the quality of our daily lives.
Dear comrades,
The flames of war are burning around us, piling up problems and difficulties for the peoples, both for those who are being bombed and for the rest who are forced to experience the consequences of globalization. The genocide of the Palestinian people continues, just as the conflicts in the other war zones.
In the difficult conditions for the entire working class, which is today under a merciless attack both by the wars and by other measures that strangle wages, rights, freedoms and social goods, FISE, the World Federation of Teachers’ Unions, which is the first TUI founded by the WFTU in 1946 in France, is called upon to respond to the needs of the educational movement. It is our duty. With ideological purity, to contribute to the strengthening of the WFTU, to defend the rights of those who work in the field of education, to defend the education to which the working class of the whole world is entitled. Education is not only about teachers; it is about all trade unions without exception. It is the task and responsibility of the FISE secretariat, first of all, to overcome weaknesses, financial difficulties, the existing problems and to achieve a congress that will give a real impetus to the organization and coordination, the effectiveness of the World Trade Union Movement of teachers.
I want to ask again today for the contribution and support of the entire Presidential Council, the support of the comrades who are responsible of the WFTU TUIs and the trade unions that are here today for the success of the 20th Congress of FISE. For the participation of more countries and more trade union organizations in the militant path that we must take.
Our opponents in the Education Internasional members of the ITUC with ample funding organize seminars and events which remain within the framework of possibilities and management of the capitalist economy. For example, after their last congress in Argentina they set up General’s High-Level Panels on the Teaching Profession in various countries to come up with proposals which they submit to the governments of the countries so that to generalize public education. They deliberately overlook and do not even comment that these governments are taking money away from health, education, social needs to turn it into NATO war equipment or their own. They are thus throwing ashes in the eyes of the teachers and workers that with their findings and advice, with negotiations and consensus, everything will be fixed.
In fact, their General Secretary David Edwards in one of his arguments for the importance of solving the problems of teachers says: “We are much more than knowledge workers; we are organized wisdom workers”.
We say that we do not stand out for our wisdom, but we must stand out for our militant action and our ability to strengthen the organization in the class unions, to strengthen FISE and the WFTU. To strengthen the front against the brutal exploitative system and those who directly or indirectly support it and cultivate directions of subordination. We are and will firmly be on the side of the peoples.
Long live the VGCL…
Long live the world working class Long live the WFTU
