Last Wednesday, Joan Coscubiela published in ARA the article “Teacher Malaise and Unionism”. An alternative title could have been “70,000 strikers are wrong; I am right!”, but the paternalism would be too obvious.Questioning the 50,000 education workers who have signed the manifesto Let's Dignify or the 40,000 teachers who have voted against the agreement between CCOO, UGT, and the Government is a rather pathetic role. That is why the author chose to attack USTEC. Not their specific actions in the current conflict, but the model of “malestar unionism” – opposed to a supposed “responsible” unionism – and its “tone”. With this, he tried to shift the conflict to the ground of moral delegitimization in order not to address either the content of the agreement – manifestly insufficient – or the gestation of its signing, outside the legitimate space of negotiation, in which CCOO and UGT do not reach 25% of the representation. Coscubiela speaks with an argumentation in hand. Therefore, the best response is to go to the things themselves.Without conflict, there is nothing to agree on. Fortunately, the usual strategy of concertation unionism of picking fruits sown by others when they are still green and presenting them as their own victories has ended in bankruptcy. What caused the formula to fail this time? Two years of organization in which the campaign Let's Dignify the Profession has contributed significantly. How did we approach it?Defining demands collectively. To politicize malaise, diagnosis is first needed. Therefore, we conducted the study of educational malaise with 12,000 surveys followed by 6,000 interviews to determine the real demands of educational staff and incorporate them into the manifesto: recover purchasing power, reduce ratios, create resources for inclusive education, and eliminate bureaucracy.Achieving the majority. We collected 50,000 signatures to build legitimacy for transversal and clear demands, promoting assemblies in each center and mapping grassroots organization. Also planning: nine months in advance, the massive educational strike of February 11 was on the calendar within a structured plan, with tests of strength like the massive demonstration on November 15.Negotiating until the end. For six months and over thirty hours, we have not left the table and have led the negotiation, contributing a large part of the measures included in the agreement. And we have done so with transparency, broadcasting the meetings live to the Dignifiquemos Forum, which has over 4,000 followers.This has been our task until the department has given up convincing and has abruptly cut off dialogue to close the agreement with the leadership of CCOO and UGT in a political operation to save the Government and pressure for budget approval. A crude demobilization maneuver on the eve of the March strikes.At the March 9 meeting, everything was already cooked: news about the signing of the agreement published while we were still “negotiating”, videos selling its virtues within a minute, signing ceremony at Palau in the afternoon. Amateur theater. That is why it is especially cynical to claim that there are unions that “never sign”, when CCOO's tactic involves delaying so that signing cannot happen at the optimal point. Otherwise, victories would be collective and could not be sold as “useful unionism”.

Perhaps the worst move by the Isla administration so far is the phantom agreement reached with the teachers' unions. This agreement, which only involved the minority unions in the sector—UGT and Comisiones Obreras—was nevertheless announced with great fanfare, hailed as "historic," and given extraordinary publicity. This left teachers feeling not only neglected but also mocked, thrown to the wolves by a public opinion all too receptive to the caricature of the teacher who takes two months of vacation and then complains. It was a tactically disastrous move because it left the major unions no option but to demonstrate their strength in the streets, in the most forceful way possible.

I cross Barcelona's Gran Vía amidst the flood of teachers. A teacher asks me if it's clear that they haven't taken to the streets solely because of salaries. I think so, that it's been clear for some time now (especially since this week of nationwide mobilizations) that they can't take it anymore, that they lack manpower and resources, that they suffer from a host of grievances, including financial ones, just like the doctors, with whom, incidentally, they've shared for years the sentiment that they're fed up with bureaucracy without anything changing.

The Catalan education law (LEC) has been in force for just over fifteen years. This is a good time to move away from nostalgia and instead make useful reference to the debates and concerns of the present. It is certainly worth recalling that, together with Francesc Colomé, we accounted for what had been accomplished during that period and shaped it in the book New school, free townPublished in 2013, we explained what, in our understanding, it meant to govern a system with over a million students and nearly 100,000 teachers.

I am a teacher. I have worked in public schools for many years, and throughout my career, I have been involved with different schools, teams, and educational projects. I write from my personal experience, knowing that not all situations are the same, but with the need to put words to an experience that has been repeated far too often over the years.

Catalonia is experiencing strange days that are dragging on longer than expected, if such a thing as strange days even has a time limit. It feels like we're living in a disaster movie, with everything unfolding in a chain reaction, like those lives that can't seem to get back on their feet. All we needed was the wind. It arrived with a warning, though, complete with an alarm, and when you hear it in the street amidst all the other alarms, it feels like a contemporary concert. It's come to assert itself amidst so much inclement weather, as if we'd been missing it. The wind, a bothersome phenomenon when it's just a breeze. The wind, which brings no answers and bursts forth with the force of someone who has no arguments. This aggressive wind, like an authoritarian leader around the world. The wind, which doesn't love trees. The noise of the wind, which keeps us awake and seeps into our brains as if a ghost wanted to speak to us. No, not that wind now. We're all too tired. But we're pinning our hopes for calm on the anticyclone that's about to arrive, they say, and that will bring a weather respite. Because you can't please everyone, and too much rain is usually harmful. They say there will be days of sunshine in a row. Perhaps we should also set an alarm to help us get all the vitamin D we're lacking. Although it's also on sunny days that everything is laid bare and the disaster becomes clearer. Just in case someone is unaware that Catalonia has been paralyzed for years and that the wind is the last thing to enter through the door. This is what happens when you leave it open. They already told us that it's wise to be careful with the draftsIn any case, you don't need to be particularly esoteric to see that everything is a sign, not very subtly, warning us that we're at the limit of too many things and that it's time to start moving in the right direction. With the wind, we must wait for it to stop, but many other situations are within human control and can be resolved.