This week, brave teachers from across the country will bring a message of hope to their class rooms. They will declare that they support refugees — and especially those on Manus Island and Nauru.
The simple act of wearing a T-shirt with the words — “Teachers for refugees” on the front and “Close the camps, Bring them here” on the back — is enough to reinforce to thousands of students that there is an alternative to cruelty.
More than 500 participants gathered at the Trade Union Congress headquarters in London on November 26 for the annual Latin America Adelante conference, now in its 12th year.
With more than 70 different speakers and 30 different workshops and plenary sessions, plus the concurrent Alborada film festival, Latin America Adelante has become one of the most important and well-known gatherings of solidarity with a continent that is increasingly facing a right-wing neoliberal backlash.
The Western Australian Division of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) released this statement on December 9.
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In a move unprecedented in the Higher Education sector Murdoch University management have applied to the Fair Work Commission to terminate the enterprise agreement covering academic and general staff at the University.
At a packed meeting on November 25, National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) members at Murdoch University in Perth expressed no confidence in the university bargaining team and called on the Vice Chancellor to intervene in the negotiations.
They voted unanimously to begin industrial action with a stop work between 8.30am and 12.30pm on December 7.
They will be the first university workers in this round of collective bargaining to take industrial action.
The Zika virus, borne by the mosquito Aedes aegypti, was declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on November 18 to no longer be a global emergency, to the dismay of many health workers around the world. This decision will minimise the amount of research and public vigilance against Zika infection.
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped for US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a conservative billionaire who “does not hide her contempt for the public schools,” according to historian Diane Ravitch.
The Kensington Legal Centre (KLC) is running a police accountability program to try to raise awareness about racial profiling and police harassment after numerous young people have been harassed by Victoria Police.
This program, which has been running for some time, began when a group of young teenagers approached KLC after being harassed by Victoria Police.
The young men report being stopped while doing everyday things.
Moroccan protesters have taken to the streets in recent days, taking advantage of the global spotlight provided by the November 7-18 United Nations COP22 climate talks in Marrakech. Mouhcine Fikri could have been any one of them.
Fikri was the fishmonger whose awful death in the back of a garbage collection truck was caught on mobile phone footage that subsequently spread across social media to ignite large demonstrations in Morocco.
The Jumbanna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology Sydney has named a meeting room after Aboriginal activist, poet and playwright Ken Canning.
Canning has a long history of political struggle and activism.
His fight for equal rights for Indigenous people led him to education in the 1980s.
In 1988 he became the first Aboriginal graduate at UTS with a BA in Communications.
Monash University plans to remove one-third of its counsellors and replace them with contractor or private practice psychologists.
It says this will improve access to counselling services.
But Monash Student Association spokesperson Kim Stern said: “Students are extremely angry. It’s a known thing at Monash that the services are minimal, to put it nicely.
"It’s very hard at the moment to get a counsellor and it’s a slap in the face that there’s now moves to cut counsellors and limit their role on campus.”
Brazil’s constitutional affairs committee in the Senate approved the PEC 55 constitutional reform to create a 20-year ceiling for federal spending on November 9.
The committee voted 19-7 and approved PEC 55, previously called PEC 241, which was proposed by coup-imposed President Michel Temer in a bid to cut Brazil's budget deficit.
Tamils in the northern province of Sri Lanka carried out a one-day strike on October 25 in protest against police repression, Tamilnet said. The strike was called by Tamil political parties after the October 20 murder of two Jaffna University students by Sinhalese police officers.