Teacher organizers from the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) are participating in the national teachers' strike, making inroads into the movement by distributing thousands of solidarity flyers, providing food supplies, and bringing people around the Party.
The National Union of Education Workers (CNTE) launched the teachers' strike and started a sit-in in Mexico City, demanding the repeal of the fascist Peña-AMLO-Sheinbaum Education Reform and the Institute for Social Security Services for State Workers (ISSSTE) Law that governs social security and health care services for federal employees. PLP rejects the bosses’ policies of repression and their violation of labor rights. We call on the entire working class to fight for communist revolution and against the attacks of the bosses' system, fascism, and imperialist war.
The 2007 ISSSTE law, imposed by former President Calderón, repealed the old pension system that guaranteed retirees a defined percentage of their final salary and replaced it with a privately-run system that pays retirees about 30 percent of their final salary.
This new system is used by approximately 85 percent of state workers, including nearly two million teachers. Current President Sheinbaum promised to repeal the 2007 ISSSTE law when she was campaigning. But, like her predecessor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), she has failed to respond to the demands of the workers. Capitalist politicians, regardless of whatever party they’re in or promises they make, serve the capitalists and will always put the banks over the needs of the working class. Only communist revolution can create a decent life for workers.
Bosses lie and scheme to steal from workers
The 2007 law put the retirement system under the control of government-selected banks, called AFORES, that collected the pension payments of the workers and invested the money to create profits for themselves. So, while teachers who retire under the new system receive a fraction of what they need to survive, AFORES from March 2024 to February 2025 alone recorded capital gains of over 774 billion pesos, an unprecedented amount for any 12 consecutive months since records began (La Jornada, March 24, 2025). This attack targeted the most precarious needs of the working class, such as the retirement benefits of workers after a lifetime of work, only to favor parasitic financial capital that produces nothing for the benefit of society. AFORES gets rich through profiteering and speculation and has accumulated enormous profits using workers' individual accounts.
By monopolizing worker’s accounts, AFORES uses the worker’s money to conduct big business and extract multimillion-dollar profits, while the pensioners upon retirement will not even receive what they saved. They are given an amount that has been devalued over the years, condemning them to a miserable pension. This behavior of financial capital and the rulers who protect them is not an exception; it's the rule. This is how the anti-working-class capitalist system works. Therefore, we communists tell all workers that the cause of the problem is the capitalist system, and the only root solution is to destroy it and build a new communist system of social equality, where all the wealth produced by the working class is distributed among the working class itself. We must consign all capitalists and their apologists in the current government to the dustbin of history.
This is the AFORES scheme that AMLO and Claudia Sheinbaum promised to cancel and now defend as the most faithful guardians of profiteering capital. This clearly demonstrates whose side they are on, and it is not on the side of the workers and "the people," as they falsely proclaim. All welfare programs represent an insufficient palliative for the great needs of workers, peasants, and students throughout the country. This aid is fleeting and momentary, as it soon ends up in stores and banks, enriching the richest capitalists. In this way, the government policy promotes the domestic market, which allows the capitalist elite to increase their enormous profits and maintain stability in the face of market fluctuations and their changing relations with the imperialists. The underlying problem remains the capitalist system. Those who defend the capitalist system are enemies of the workers. Fighting teachers, must fight for communism!
NYC teachers’ statement of solidarity
We, public school teachers in New York City, send international revolutionary support and solidarity to the teachers in Oaxaca and throughout Mexico who are on strike. We admire your courage and your dedication to your students and communities in the face of continued state repression.
Your fight against the government’s attempts to weaken the union and for better conditions for students and teachers is important—not just in Oaxaca, but everywhere. We take inspiration from your struggle as we fight back against the increased fascist attacks on our own students here in the United States. Same Enemy Same Fight! Workers of the World Unite!
