African Governments Start Auctioning Education To Highest Bidders

Correspondent | Monday September 5, 2016 16:14

 

Job stability is no longer guaranteed for millions of teachers, which is in violation of the 1966 ILO/UNESCO Recommendation: Stability of employment and security of tenure in the profession are essential in the interests of education as well as that of the teacher and should be safe-guarded even when changes in the organisation of or within a school system are made; that there are attacks aimed at destroying the rights that workers and democrats have fought for, for over a century, at national and international level.

Comrades the right to strike is a cornerstone of democracy and social justice, and has been internationally recognised for more than 50 years. Approximately 90 countries have incorporated the right to strike in their national constitutions.  In recent months, the employers’ representatives at ILO have been challenging the very legal foundation of the right to strike and its domestication into national law, to the point of disrupting the functioning of the ILO’s supervisory mechanisms.

The Employers’ Group at the ILO seems intent on finding ways to eliminate the right to strike altogether. Meanwhile, social protests are being increasingly criminalised in a number of countries where workers are already suffering from austerity measures imposed by their governments. Amongst other things, the seventh EI congress mandated the Executive Board:

l  To set up a campaign to defend security of tenure for teachers guaranteed by a statute;

l To vigorously lobby the relevant intergovernmental organisations, such as UNESCO, UNICEF, ILO, OECD, the World Bank and  the IMF, and ensuring that they make these demands known to the whole world.

Furthermore, the 1966 ILO/UNESCO Recommendation on the Status of Teachers indicates that: 

l Teachers should be adequately protected against arbitrary action affecting their professional standing or career;

l Teachers’ organisations should be recognised as a force, which can contribute greatly to educational advance and which therefore should be associated with the determination of educational policy;

l And that both salaries and working conditions for teachers should be determined through the process of negotiation between teachers’ organisations and the employers of teachers.
 We are briefed that you are engaging on a number of unpopular and arbitrary legislative framework decisions by the State/Government.

On the Public Service Act; The Teaching Council Bill; Examination Council Bill; Hours of work in the Teaching Service/Overtime; Promotion for teachers and Promotion for teachers Education International is fully behind BOSETU and your other affiliates in Botswana, as you aim to vigorously fight back the essentialisation of the Education Sector, which threatens to take away the right to strike.  We want to state that free quality basic education is one of the best solutions for combating child labour.

Free quality basic education is also a prerequisite for lifelong learning, as people need to develop sufficient skills to be able to participate fully in society.

Any economic policy that privatises and reduces public investment in education will marginalise children and adults living in poverty while reducing the quality of public education.

Declaring education as an essential service is against ILO conventions and I want to take you through some of the failed attempts by some governments in the past because they undermined ILO standards, especially Convention 876 and Convention 98.

In relation to teachers the Freedom of Association Committee has indicated that they do not fall within the definition of essential services, despite the importance of their service to pupils and the community at large.

In a case involving Argentina (Case no 2157(Argentina) 329th Report of the CFEA), a ministerial promulgation declaring state and private education to be essential services was declared unlawful by the ILO Freedom of Association Committee, which indicated that the education sector does not constitute an essential service in the strict sense of the term. This was after the Confederation of Education Workers of Argentina and the Latin American Federation of Workers in Education and Culture levelled allegations against the Government of Argentina that there was a violation of the right to strike of education workers by virtue of the promulgation of ministerial.

A similar conclusion was drawn by the Committee in 1991 after the World Confederation of Organisations of the Teaching Profession on behalf of its affiliated organisation, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers presented a complaint of violations of trade union rights against the Government of the Philippines in January 1991.

In this complaint, the committee mentioned that it had been faced with several cases prior to 1991 involving restrictions on the freedom of association of teachers, be they employed in the private sector, as non-titular public employees or having the status of civil servants. The unwavering approach to the question of whether they, as teachers, should be allowed to exercise the right to strike has been repeated subsequently. 

Committee considers that workers in education are not covered by the definition of essential services or of the public service exercising the powers of public authority. The protection of teacher’s right to strike is further emphasised by paragraph 84 of the 1966 ILO and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisations Recommendations Concerning the Status of Teachers, which provides as follows:

“Appropriate joint machinery should be set up to deal with the settlement of disputes between the teachers and their employers arising out of terms and conditions of employment.  

If the means and procedures established for these purposes should be exhausted or there should be a breakdown in negotiations between the parties, teachers organisations should have the right to take such other steps as are normally open to other organisations in the defence of their legitimate interest.”

 

The Weighing Of The

Right To Strike Versus

The Right To Education

According to Mcllroy: “As long as our society is divided between those who own and control the means of production and those who only have the ability to work, strikes will be inevitable because they are the ultimate means workers have of protecting themselves”.  See Mcllroy Strike! How to fight. How to win (1984) 15.

 How can we fight unjust laws as the profession?  EI calls the trade unions in Botswana to unite.

Unity and solidarity is our strengths. The only choice the workers have when confronted by these regressive legislations is to stand together, fight together. 

The only choice trade unions have is develop joint campaigns and mobilise their members to fight in defense of the Freedom of Association as a fundamental human right.  We urge you to open talks amongst yourselves as unions in education.

New Imperatives required as we implant the theme “More time for every student, changing the future of each learner”

The 21st century demands that we move from the prescriptive to the professional imperative, from the imperial to the interpretive imperative, from ideological to the existential imperative, from insular to the global imperative, from  instrumental to the evidentiary imperative. This is what your theme dictates my comrades.

Education International wishes you a very successful conference, filled with robust, frank but honest engagements that will map the way forward on how to better shape the education sector for the brighter future of Botswana.

Thank You!!!!  Halala BOSETU Halala.....

 

* Mugwana Maluleke was speaking at  the Botswana Sectors of Educators Trade Union (BOSETU) Annual Conference 19-20 August 2017, Francistown, Botswana.