Last week, public school teachers from the state of São Paulo and its capital city of the same name held a one-day strike against the growing attacks on education in Brazil and the deterioration of living conditions due to inflation.

They are fighting not only against the local allies of fascist ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, governor Tarcísio de Freitas and mayor Ricardo Nunes, but also against the teachers unions which have a record of isolating and betraying their struggles.

At the end of the 2010s, Brazilian teachers participated militantly in the global wave of education strikes against austerity and pro-corporate programs in education. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, they represented a crucial sector of the global working class fighting against the reopening of unsafe workplaces.

Today, the attacks on education and social and democratic rights spearheaded by the governments of fascist presidents Javier Milei of Argentina and Donald Trump of the United States have taken place as part of a turn by the world’s ruling oligarchies towards dictatorship and nuclear world war. In the region historically considered the backyard of US imperialism, they have served as role models for local elites.

In São Paulo, Governor Freitas and Mayor Nunes have been carrying out a pro-corporate teacher accountability program, implementing a series of external evaluations, mandatory targets and punishments for principals, teachers, and schools if they are not met. In addition, they have advanced the privatization and militarization of schools.

On Tuesday, March 18, thousands of teachers from São Paulo’s municipal public school system gathered in front of City Hall to protest against mayor Nunes’ latest attack: the reduction of working hours for readapted teachers. These teachers are mainly out of the classroom due to mental health problems, carrying out administrative tasks in the schools. By reducing their working hours, their salaries could be slashed to a third of their normal pay.

According to history teacher Marlei, with whom WSWS spoke, the attack is not just on this group of teachers, but on the very “condition of being readapted. “You may not be readapted today, but tomorrow you could be,” she said, whether it’s because of a mental health problem or any of the other problems besetting teachers. For this reason, the mayor’s attack “is not on the group of readapted teachers, but on the right to working hours that needs to be preserved.”

She drew attention to the fact that municipal teachers are also starting the 2025 salary campaign, demanding a 44 percent salary hike to reverse a series of attacks in recent years. “Working conditions are obviously terrible; we work under pressure,” said Marlei. “Just the fact that you work under the pressure that you could lose your rights, that alone, which is not all, is a lot. It already puts you in a mental situation of stress, anxiety. It’s unhealthy. You can’t do your job fully.”

Regarding Mayor Nunes’ accountability policy, she said, “It’s a global trend of a minimal state to make things precarious first and then privatize.” The precariousness of working conditions, according to Marlei, is part of “an intentional dismantling of the school to make sure that schools don’t reach their targets in external evaluations and to blame managers and teachers for privatizing management.”

At the end of last year, Mayor Nunes passed a bill in the City Council to privatize sports, cultural, and leisure centers and allow partnerships with the private sector in education, health, and housing.

Justifying the privatization of school management, Nunes said last November, “We have schools that are working with a huge ideological concept and the IDEB [Basic Education Development Index] is very low.” This reactionary argument, which claims that there is supposed leftist indoctrination in education and puts the blame on teachers for low educational results, has been advanced by the global far right and was one of the reasons for the Trump administration’s dismantling of the US Department of Education.

In the state of São Paulo’s public schools, Governor Freitas has advanced a no less reactionary program against education and public services. He is Bolsonaro’s principal political heir and one of those tipped to be the candidate of Brazil’s extreme right in the 2026 presidential election. The reactionary agenda of Freitas, the leading defender of the “Milei model” in Brazil, includes unprecedented police repression, the privatization last year of SABESP, one of the largest sanitation companies in the world, and plans to privatize several train and metro lines in São Paulo.

In education, he managed to privatize 33 state schools last year. Companies that win the bids will be responsible for school meals, internet service, security, maintenance, and janitorial services. As part of his fight against alleged indoctrination in education, Governor Freitas reduced class time allocated to history, geography, sociology, and philosophy by 35.1 percent this year compared to 2020.

For the second half of this year, he wants to militarize 100 schools to supposedly combat indiscipline and violence. Not even the US-backed military dictatorship was able to implement such a measure during the 21 years (1964-1985) that it ruled Brazil under a regime of repression and censorship. In these schools, students are obliged to wear military-style uniforms and follow a strict disciplinary regime that includes a ban on “having in their possession, introducing, reading or distributing, within the school unit, posters, newspapers or publications that violate morals.”

São Paulo’s state schools have become a living hell under the Freitas administration. An extensive regime of external evaluations, the establishment of educational platforms in partnership with private companies, and a rigorous system of targets and demands on the entire school community have led to a growing situation of moral harassment in schools and teacher sickness. Public school teachers in São Paulo, Brazil’s richest and most industrialized state, also face some of the lowest salaries in the country.

To alleviate growing pressure from rank-and-file teachers, the São Paulo state teachers union, APEOESP, called a strike assembly on March 21. Thousands of teachers packed the República Square, in the center of São Paulo, to hear the union bureaucracy of the Workers Party (PT) and the pseudo-left Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL) tell them that a strike must be “built” based on the “unity” of these corrupt political forces.

Despite a significant number of teachers voting for a strike immediately or next week, the PT and PSOL union bureaucracy managed to postpone a possible strike until April 25, when a new assembly will take place. This process was already seen at the end of April of last year, when the bureaucracy was booed and harassed by a significant part of the more than 10,000 teachers present at an assembly where it postponed the start of a strike until the following month.

Fearing that the new assembly would get out of hand, the union bureaucracy did everything possible to demobilize the teachers’ struggle. Only a few hundred teachers took part in the next assembly at a time when the Freitas government managed to pass its bill to implement civic-military schools amid brutal police repression of student protests.

This dynamic was also seen at the municipal teachers’ assembly last week. The proposal approved was for a “state of strike,” in which throughout this and the next few weeks teachers will hold regional one-day strikes, and on April 30 there will be a new general assembly with a strike proposal. Marlei told the WSWS that this “proposal was not presented clearly to the teachers,” making the vote “dubious and troubled, to say the least.”

After the assembly, many teachers were confused about what would happen the following week, with a significant proportion believing that a class-wide strike would begin. Teacher Marlei said, “This caused a conflict ... between the teachers and the union [SINPEEM], especially the figure of [president] Cláudio Fonseca... The impression is that instead of fighting with the mayor, we’re fighting with the union.”

The teachers’ struggle in São Paulo is part of a growing movement of the Brazilian and international working class against sweeping attacks on working and living conditions by the world’s capitalist elite.

In education alone in São Paulo, students from state schools have been protesting in recent weeks against the closure of classes by the Freitas government. This week, outsourced cleaning staff at several schools in São Paulo’s municipal system also went on strike against salary and food voucher delays. Next week, teachers at SESI (Social Service for Industry) will begin a strike approved by 83 percent of them.

São Paulo’s teachers, students, and school staff must understand that the attacks on education are part of a broad movement by the world’s capitalist ruling elites to establish governments of, for, and by the oligarchy amid growing social inequality in every country. At the same time, they are also fighting against the nationalist and pro-corporate trade unions, which in recent decades have been entirely undermined by capitalist globalization and have become incapable of even minimally defending the wages, working conditions, and jobs of the working class.

Last week’s developments in São Paulo reinforce the call of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to build independent rank-and-file committees in opposition to the unions, the capitalist political parties, and their pseudo-left satellites. Only such committees can struggle to unify teachers on both national and international levels.

The building of such a unified movement “must be linked to the building of a working class political movement against the two corporatist parties, which fights for workers to seize political power, expropriate the oligarchs, and use society’s wealth to greatly expand public education and social equality,” as the recent statement by the US Educators Rank-and-File Committee declared. 

Here in Brazil, we call on teachers to adopt this perspective and take forward a struggle against the source of the attacks on education, the capitalist system.