One Struggle! One Fight! International Education Movement Unite!
We, the members of the Student Worker Action Team, a UC Berkeley based workers and students group fighting back the budget cuts and fee hikes, and the undersigned send our fullest solidarity with the mobilized students in the U.K. who have been occupying their schools, blockading streets and protesting for the past month against the tuition hikes and against the privatization of public education. The mobilization of the U.K. students have brought out thousands and have been a great inspiration to the students and workers in the United States, specifically in California, where students and workers are also fighting against fee hikes, cuts to public education and to public services.
The U.K. student movement has been rising rapidly the past month and there is now likely to be an increase in the intensity of the actions because the British administration has announced that the vote on the doubling of tuition fees and other course fees will take place on December 9th. Therefore, UK students and organizations have called for another massive mobilization on this day. We also send our best wishes to the over 29 school occupations that are still going on.
The British administrations’ under-funding of education and attempts at the private financing of University services represent an open and aggressive attack on the public education system. This is only the most recent attack in a long term project of the British banks, corporations and the right-wing to transform the function of public institutions into profit driven institutions, to crush the unions and the right to freedom of speech and dissent on the campuses and streets, and to narrow access to public education to the most privileged sectors of the population. Likewise, this same struggle has been occurring not only in the United States, but in Spain, Italy, France, South Africa, Japan, Brazil and other countries in the world.
The fight for public education everyone’s fight because these cuts represent an attack on the entire working class. We know that these attacks are being imposed on an international level and that the ruling class is watching the outcomes of our struggles to see how to impose similar measures across the globe.
We face similar cuts to education across the entire public education system in California and we have been holding massive protests since Sept 2009 but we have only been able to reverse just half of all budget cuts applied since 2009. Recently, a statewide conference united different public education sectors in October 30-31 & voted on an action plan on mobilizing Nationwide Day of Action on March, 2 2011. Students and workers will be mobilizing to fight the massive reductions in funding for public education and public services that not only threaten the quality of and access to affordable education, but also jeopardize workers’ living and working conditions. We are building up democratic bases of mobilization, grounded in firm unity of students and workers across sectors, to push this struggle forward amidst enormous repression. The students of Britain today are an enormous source of inspiration for the public education movement in Berkeley and the rest of California.
In mutual inspiration and for a great December 8th & 9th
Signed by SWAT and in alphabetical order by:
Bay Area United Against War Newsletter (bauaw.org),
International Socialist Organization (ISO),
La Voz de los Trabajadores (www.lavozlit.com)
More info on the U.K. mobilizations at: http://anticuts.com/ National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts
More info of California mobilizations at: http://mobilizeberkeley.com/ and ca.defendpubliceducation.org
