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AAUP Participates in International Meeting
By Ariel Anderson
In July, I had the honor of serving as a delegate for the AAUP to the Fourth World Congress of Education International (EI) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen and Mike Mauer, director of organizing and services, were also in attendance, and they represented the Association, the premier voice for higher education in the United States, at the meeting's higher education caucus. EI is the worldwide federation of teachers' unions and professional organizations, and approximately 1,500 representatives from organizations around the world attended the congress.
The congress included an address by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, a former trade union leader and an exceptionally strong supporter of unionism in education, who described a number of innovative programs un-der way to ensure free public education and health assistance for all citizens. In her address, outgoing EI president Mary Hatwood Futrell spoke about the profound effect that HIV/AIDS has had on educators in many developing nations. She described the situation of the teachers' union in Namibia, which spends half its income on benefits to families of members who have died of AIDS, and said that in some African countries, one in seven teachers is infected with the HIV virus. In response to this crisis, EI has established programs to help make medicine more affordable. Other delegates addressed the meeting on a wide range of issues, including obstacles to winning better maternity leave provisions in the Philippines, the devastating effect of prolonged war on the Liberian educational system, and the difficulty of persuading female educators in Taiwan to become politically active when they are made to feel guilty for working outside the home. A recurring theme of the congress was the need to protect public education from threats posed by diminishing public funding in many countries and by international trade agreements such as the General Agreement on Trade in Services.
The women's caucus was a particularly powerful experience for me, as I listened carefully to well-educated, professional women from other nations recount their experiences and standards of daily life. While we still have significant business to tend to in our own nation regarding the treatment of women in general, and the treatment of women in education in particular, I gained a deeper appreciation for the distance we have traveled thus far toward fair and equitable treatment of women in the profession.
Ariel Anderson is chair of the Association's Collective Bargaining Congress.
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