Petition letter gets no response, instead protesters taken home by local authorities.
By Fu Danni
Dozens of nearly retired teachers protested Wednesday in front of the provincial education department in Changsha, the capital of central China’s Hunan province. Employed without contracts for decades, they demand to be officially recognized so they can receive pensions.
“When the country needed us, we held up half the sky of village education,” Li Aiai, one of the protesters, told Sixth Tone in a telephone interview. “But now that they don’t need us, they won’t take care of us.”
On Wednesday Li and the other protesters couldn’t find an education department official willing to talk to them, and so they decided to file a letter to the department’s petition office instead. “We are the forgotten village preschool teachers,” the letter starts, according to images sent to Sixth Tone by Li.
Teachers protesting for pensions pose for a photo in front of the provincial education department in Changsha, Hunan province, Aug. 24, 2016. Courtesy of Li Aiai
When they handed in their petition letter, the teachers were told that a response would come after 4 p.m. the same day. But instead of a response, officials from lower-level education departments from various locations in Hunan showed up to take the teachers back home, Li said.
The Hunan Provincial Education Department could not be reached for comment when contacted by Sixth Tone on Friday.
Teachers like Li were recruited in the 1980s to teach preschool children in Hunan’s countryside as part of a government drive to improve early childhood education. But the teachers were not given official employment contracts, and are thus ineligible for government pensions.
Starting in 1997, the national government started to transfer some of these teachers to official positions, and in some cases provided compensation to those who had already retired. But a large number of teachers who were unaware of this reform drive did not apply to be transferred or compensated.
The teachers have organized themselves in a chat group on messaging app WeChat, which currently has more than 150 members. They started their protest on Monday, and on every day of this week a different group has visited the education department to protest their case.
“We are all qualified teachers,” said Li. “In 1984 I took the official selection test, and later I also obtained related education certificates.” The 52-year-old said she will retire in three years, and she is afraid that when that time comes, she won’t have any money to live on. Li started teaching in a primary school in Youyi Village, central Hunan, after she graduated high school.
(Header image: A rural teacher gives a lesson at a school in Baiyin, Gansu province, June 10, 2014. Cao Zhizhen/VCG)
