ARGENTINA-EDUCATION: Teachers on Hunger Strike for a Living Wage

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 7 1997 (IPS) - Public school teachers have entered the second month of a hunger strike to back demands for a “living wage.”

The teachers are fasting in a 160-square metre tent pitched in front of Congress. One of the group, 38-year-old Guillermo Pecheure, says the worst thing is not the liquid diet on which the the strikers are exisitng, but the long nights away from his family.

Pecheure, a teacher in the southern province of Neuquen, decided to travel to Buenos Aires and join the hunger strikers when he saw that the leaders of the teachers’ unions were also putting their lives on the line.

“I dream about food and wake up desperate. But there is another food which we are given by the people who come and tell us ‘that’s the way!’,” says Pecheure. “We are convinced of what we are doing, and we know we have to carry on.”

Now the Secretary Ggeneral of the Confederation of Teachers’ Unions, Marta Maffei, has joined those fasting. A teacher for 38 years, the 56-year-old Maffei has been at the head of one of the country’s largest unions for three years.

Leaning on a small table that serves as an improvised office, Maffei says “there is no way to transform the educational system if the budget does not change.”

Teachers’ salaries in Argentina – always modest – declined drastically in recent years. In 1989, a teacher’s wages could cover 50 percent of the Basic Consumer Basket of necessities (BCB). Today, the top wage covers less than 40 percent, while the average salary salary of a teacher is less than 25 percent of the amount needed for the BCB.

Around 66 percent of the country’s 650,000 public school teachers earn less then 350 dollars a month, while the BCB is estimated at 1,378 dollars – which not even a university professor earns.

Along with a pay increase, teachers are urging the approval of at least one of the 11 draft laws on the educational budget that have been shelved in Congress for up to four years.

Over the past 15 years, the public school student population has swelled at all levels – two percent in the universities and up to 63 percent in other sectors. The teachers point to the urgent need for schools and teaching material to satisfy the growing demand for education.

Maintenance costs in schools have increased as the privatization of public utility services has seen electricity, gas and telephone charges soar by up to 3,600 percent. A 1991 law governing financing of the educational system projected a 20 percent annual increase to deal with such problems. But funds for education have remained steady at three percent of the Gross Domestic Product for the past six years.

Furthermore, the central government decided to shift the responsibility for the maintenance of schools to the provinces, but without providing additional funding – a transfer of close to 1.37 billion dollars in expenses to provinces that were already penniless.

The Economy Ministry also eliminated three taxes on which the 1991 educational budget law was based: one percent of foreign currency transfers, one per thousand of bank debts and two percent of the tax on assets were to go to education.

“They didn’t dare overturn the law in 1992, but they decided to gut it: they eliminated three taxes that brought in 800 million dollars a year,” says Maffei.

The teachers then decided on the hunger strike, to raise awareness among the public and authorities of the gravity of the crisis shaking the education sector.

The fasters are supported by active and retired teachers, students, parents, workers from other unions and prominent writers and artists. Ernesto Sabato and Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano are two of the public figures who have visited the white tent that sports an enormous banner reading “Fasting Teachers and Professors.”

Actors and other prize-winners at this year’s “Martin Fierro” ceremony for local TV and radio programmes also expressed their support for the teachers when stepping up to receive their prizes.

Maffei says she has missed seeing her first grandson, born in April in southern Argentina. She misses her husband, and privacy, living alongside some 50 teachers who are fasting or supporting the strikers.

But she feels comforted by the letters and drawings of support sent by thousands of students, and says the fasters are prepared for the worst consequences to defend an ideal that is facing a sure death by starvation – of funds: the public school system.