On October 13th, following the call of the Coordinating Council of Cultural Associations, large numbers of employed and retired teachers gathered in more than 40 cities and insisted on their demands, by chanting slogans, giving speeches and making statements.
Teachers are protesting against the worsening of their living conditions and the poor state of education, discrimination and inequality, embezzlement and theft, repression and daily attacks on their lives and livelihoods. One of the immediate issues is their protests against the lack of full implementation of the rankings, the lack of full implementation of the equalization of retirees, and the increase in teachers’ working hours from 24 hours to 30 hours per week. Teachers have staged many rallies to follow these demands and these issues in the new round of protests. A powerful example of this was on September 25th in 45 cities.On this day, the main slogan of teachers in different gatherings was “Teacher must be released from prison”. At the moment several teachers are in prion including Ismail Abdi a meber of executive board of Teachers’ Association of Tehran who has been sentenced to 10 years prion, and Ismail Gerami a retired teacher has been sentence to 6 years jail and 74 lashes. Teachers also shouted slogans such as “Teacher is awake, he hates discrimination”, “Teacher shout, shout the truth”, “Astronomical thefts, general misery”, “No surrender, no compromise, no unwilling ranking”, “Implementation of parity” “No cheating”, “Ranking is our right, the result of our suffering”, “We don’t want empty promises”, “Teacher does not accept humiliation, even if dies”, “We heard many promises, we did not see any changes”. By these slogans the teachers expressed their anger toward the policies of the government and the education system.
Free Them Now (campaign to free jailed workers in Iran)
October 14, 2021