Nation-wide strikes by Iranian teachers marked their fifth straight day on Thursday, April 30, 2009.
NCRI- The strikes covered provinces like Tehran, Isfahan, Fars, Khorasan, Kermanshah, Lorestan, Hamedan, Yazd, Arak, Western and Eastern Azerbaijan, and Hormozgan. In various parts of the capital, Tehran, teachers refused to attend classes.
Nation-wide strikes by Iranian teachers marked their fifth straight day on Thursday, April 30, 2009.
NCRI- The strikes covered provinces like Tehran, Isfahan, Fars, Khorasan, Kermanshah, Lorestan, Hamedan, Yazd, Arak, Western and Eastern Azerbaijan, and Hormozgan. In various parts of the capital, Tehran, teachers refused to attend classes.
The strikes are in protest to deteriorating living conditions, discriminatory policies imposed by the ruling mullahs’ education system, as well as the failure to implement the service management law offering a pay rise for teachers.
The law, which was supposed to be carried out five months ago, proposes a minimum 30 percent salary rise for teachers. However, there have been no practical measures adopted in this regard thus far.
The nation-wide strikes by Iranian teachers take place at a time when the clerical regime has undertaken an extensive effort to marshal its security and intelligence agents in a bid to prevent the protests. The mullahs’ newspapers have decided to boycott the event labeling it as an “attempt to create unrest and threaten national security.” The regime’s initiatives, however, have all failed in the face of the teachers’ perseverance.
On April 26, a group of part time teachers gathered in front the clerical regime’s Majlis (Parliament) building in protest to their intolerable living conditions. Traveling from various cities to Tehran, they also protested against lack of employment despite more than ten years of experience, being deprived of employment benefits such as medical insurance and the housing allowance. According to the Administrative Association of Iranian Teachers, a number of the demonstrators were arrested at the gathering and taken to an undisclosed location.
The clerical regime’s intelligence agents have arrested dissident teachers on many occasions, murdering a number of them. On December 30, 2008, Mr. Ahmad Taghavi, a primary school teacher, was mysteriously murdered while going home in the city of Dezfoul.
Ms. Soheila Sadegh, Chair of the Education Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, lauded the protesting teachers in Iran, and urged all human rights organizations and teachers’ syndicates and labour unions around the world to support the legitimate demands of teachers in Iran. She also called on international and human rights organizations, especially the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, to undertake urgent and binding measures to free the arrested teachers.
Education Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
April 30, 2009