May Day: Wisdom workers of the world, unite, inspire, lead!
We are Education International. We are over 33 million teachers and education workers across 180 countries and territories. We educate the world.
In our classrooms, in our schools and universities, in our communities, we stand together for public education, for our profession, for people and planet.
This May Day and every day, we are rising up against billionaires who see our labour as a “tax” on their productivity, who exploit and avoid paying their fair share in a spiral of endless greed.
We are rising up against authoritarians and oligarchs who want to rig our democracies and starve our education systems and public services in order to lock billions of people into cycles of poverty and powerlessness.
We are rising up against arms dealers and warmongers who have bottomless budgets for wanton destruction with no accountability to international law and no respect for human life and dignity.
We are rising up against AI tech companies who seek to addict our children to their products in order to raise customers instead of critical thinkers. We resist all attempts to replace the student-teacher relationship—the foundation of education and civilisation for millennia—with transactional, sycophantic, anthropomorphic chatbots that monopolise our attention, feed on our knowledge without our permission, monetize our own creative work and sell it back to us as progress.
We are rising against fossil fuel monopolies that harm our planet and work to undermine efforts to build a green and sustainable future for all.
We are the organised wisdom workers and we are mobilising across communities to educate and inspire a different future.
This May Day, we call on people everywhere to rise with us. Unplug, reach out, connect!
We must open our eyes and recognise our individual struggle in the shared struggle that binds all of humanity together.
We must stand in solidarity and choose each other with all our strength and all our courage.
We must choose humanity, dignity, love, and equality not as empty slogans but as our shared future.
The global education union movement will continue to be a beacon, a shield, and a formidable force that resists and rises up for our students and our communities all around the globe.
Now. Wisdom workers of the world, unite, inspire, lead!
