You heard it on No Te Duermas
Mario Sequeira, general secretary of the Federation of University Teachers (FEDUN) and Deputy Secretary of the Association of Teachers of the National University of La Matanza (ADUNLaM), was interviewed by telephone by Claudio Kapeller and Oscar Pettinato on the radio program No Te Duermas.
Initially he referred to the days of struggle and strike in defense of the salary rights of university teaching workers.
Accumulated inflation and increase
After the second day of university strikes and when asked about the meaning of declaring an emergency; Mario Sequeira said: “On this second day of strike, a forceful measure that is being carried out with great success throughout the Argentine university system. The accumulated situation from December to July was 133%, and the salary increase for teachers and non-teaching staff was 71%, we had a salary loss of 62%, the biggest crisis in the entire history of universities.”
“Within more than twenty years of collective bargaining, this is also the breaking of the collective bargaining session by this government that is full of cruelty, adjustment policies, and planned misery. We have no choice but to join together as public university workers for the first time in a union agreement,” he said.
The March of April 23, a failure
“On the way, together with the students through FUBA and the rectors, we had organized that historic night of April 23, a period of sixty, ninety days of that march, after lies, proposals, no answers, we returned to the plan of struggle that gives rise to the non-start of classes for the second semester, on August 2, 24 hours of strike and this second part of 48 hours makes this salary crisis determine the universities before declaring a crisis also with the budget problem. It declares a crisis of not being able to sustain the non-increase for the workers.”
The crisis of 2001
Recalling the crisis of 2001, Sequeira said: “At that time the universities went out to the streets, López Murphy was trying to reduce the budgets, we had taken over the university, there was a political flexibility, a quick response, but here there is a key intentionality that this government is not interested in the current model of the public university.”
“University workers, both teachers and non-teaching staff, are very concerned about this. Not only do we know that we will not recover our salaries, but we also know our moral obligation in the fight for this university model.”
Regarding the government’s position regarding their demands, he admitted: “The university budget in each university is divided into two large items; one is the functioning of the university in the operational part, the part of public services is around ten percent of each university and between eighty-eight and ninety percent is the payment of teacher salaries and student scholarships.”
“Everyone knows that when state budgets are not approved, there is no consensus in Congress and they continue to be updated through the chief of staff. The government’s refusal to maintain it with a 2022 budget that is not updated to 2023, but updated in practice, that is what makes the budget devalued by more than two hundred and seventy percent due to inflation.”
Elaborating on the subject, he added: “They expect universities to continue to maintain themselves with this; when many universities in the area of public services, with all the increases, are in debt of more than forty, sixty million pesos with Edenor, they do not cut off the light because they are universities, at any moment more than one will be left without electricity.”
“This not increasing salaries causes the best teachers to end up resigning”
“The danger is that if the university is not financed in one way or another, they will look for financing in some way and that leads to the path of charging fees for education, this government loves the voucher policy. Apart from that, it disarms the university in terms of educational quality, this not increasing salaries causes the best teachers to end up resigning, they do not match what they spend.”
“Due to the simple assignment type in the nursing career, some teachers have resigned and it also harms the quality of teachers in the technological career. There are not many engineers who dedicate themselves to teaching but they do share the activity of private companies with universities in a way of giving back what they learned, but, when there is a conflict, what they do is withdraw and dedicate themselves to private activity.”
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