Teachers' Strikes Against the Coup in Brazil: How Educators Engage in Political Mobilization

• In Event: Teachers Strike! Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

On June 12, 2016, the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff of the Brazilian Workers Party (PT), was forced to step down from the presidency due to allegedly manipulated budget accounts. Her Vice President, Michel Temer of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), himself embedded in corruption scandals, fired her entire cabinet and appointed in its place a cabinet of his political allies—all of whom were white males. Then, Temer began to push forward a series of reforms that included a freeze on public spending for public education and health for twenty years, a restructuring of the high school system, a change in workers’ rights legislation to allow contracts to trump workers’ rights laws, the elimination of automatic union dues, and most polemically, a major transformation of the public pension system. Union leaders decried the impeachment as political coup d’état: using the rallying call of “corruption” to overthrow a legitimately elected government to implement unpopular reforms. Due to the discontent with Temer’s neoliberal reforms, the past year in Brazil was one of the most contentious in the history of the country.
In this paper, the two presenters will argue that teachers have played a critical role in the mobilization of the left in Brazil over the past year. The first presenter will discuss the role of teacher mobilizing at the national level and the social movements and union fronts that were formed to resist the new government. The National Confederation of Education Workers (CNTE) played a leading role in the Brazil Popular Front, and called on its 50 teachers unions to participate in a strike on March 15, 2017. This movement grew to include other worker groups, leading to a general strike on April 28. The CNTE articulated the resistance of more than 40 entities, from unions to student groups and academic associations, and helped to create the National Popular Education Forum (FNPE), all of which illustrates how teachers became protagonists in the resistance against Temer. The second presenter will discuss the role of the São Paulo State Teachers union (APEOESP), and how this union of 200,000 teachers was also critical to the national mobilizations in March and April 2017. Based on 10 months of ethnographic field research and 60 in-depth interviews, the presenter will argue that APEOSP played a critical role educating students, parents, and other teachers about the effects of these reforms, which helped lead to the successful mobilization. The author will also discuss the distinct political visions within the São Paulo teachers union.
The goal of this presentation is to reflect on the role of teachers unions as social movement actors. Rather than simply defending their economic interests, teachers unions are protagonists countering neoliberal reforms. These reflections on how and when teachers become important political actors is critical to understanding the grassroots responses to the current conservative global political conjuncture.

Authors

• Dalila Andrade Oliveira, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

• Rebecca Tarlau, Pennsylvania State University