BY TAFADZWA CHOTO
HARARE More than 600 teachers have been fired for striking for better pay, it was reported on October 15. The state-controlled Herald newspaper reported that 627 members of the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) were fired because they had not returned to work by October 11.
Faced with an inflation rate of 135%, the militant PTUZ members stopped work on October 8 to demand a 100% pay rise, backdated to January, and another 100% rise backdated to June. Teachers in Harare occupied their schools.
The government of President Robert Mugabe declared the strike illegal as teaching is an "essential service".
PTUZ secretary-general Raymond Majongwe and union president Takavafira Zhou were arrested on October 9 under the draconian Public Order and Security Act. Majongwe was seriously tortured by the police before being released on bail on October 12. He was hardly able to walk.
Majongwe and other PTUZ officials turned themselves in after police ransacked their houses and threatened to assault their families. Other officials were forced to go underground. PTUZ offices were closed down by the police and the union evicted from its head office by the pro-state Red Cross, which owned the building.
The brutal Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front regime is desperate that this strike, by the biggest section of Zimbabwe's working class, not succeed because it could give confidence to other sections of the working class.
The PTUZ has appealed for international solidarity. Messages can be sent to <progressive_za@yahoo.com>.
[Tafadzwa Choto is coordinator of the newly formed Anti-Privatisation Forum and a leader of the International Socialists of Zimbabwe.]
From Green Left Weekly, October 23, 2002.
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