Committee for Public Education (Australia): Support the fight against GM layoffs!
By
the Committee for Public Education (CFPE)
9 February 2019
The Committee for Public Education (CFPE) in Australia extends the warmest solidarity and calls on teachers and students across the Midwest to attend the February 9 demonstration against General Motors’ mass layoffs that has been organised in Detroit by the World Socialist Web Site Auto Newsletter and the Steering Committee of the Coalition of Rank-and-File Committees.
General Motors is preparing to close five plants in the US and Canada and destroy over 15,000 jobs, at the same time as it reports annual profits of nearly $12 billion. The corporate elite in the US and around the world are seeking to turn the clock back to the 1930s, eliminating any and all restrictions on the accumulation of ever greater profit and personal wealth at the top of society.
With the support of the Republican and Democratic parties, and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, the auto giants are pursuing a global restructuring agenda that aims to pit workers in different countries against one another, while destroying tens of thousands of jobs and driving down wages and conditions.
Teachers and other workers in the public education system confront the same enemy as auto workers. While the ultra-wealthy elite spare no resources to give the best private education that money can buy for their own children, we are told that “there is no money” to fund properly resourced public schools for working class communities, with well-paid and supported teachers and other school staff.
It is time to take a stand! Teachers around the world have followed, with immense sympathy and support, the determined struggles waged by American public school teachers in the…