Government locks-out a half million Danish kids from school
Channel: Bent Lorentzen
Date: 2013-04-12

Interviews in English. In this video, filmed and edited today, April 12, you will experience one of Denmark's largest worker-conflicts in history, now in progress.   It is directly impacting over a half million children and their families in a country of just over 5 million. For the past year, the national government, under prime minister Helle Thorning Schmidt, has been attempting to reshape our public schools such that children become less exposed to free-thinking and more like robots for industry.  

Within that agenda, corporate taxes have been slashed while workers, their taxes now increased, pay for that "trickle down" myth by having their contracted wages, health care, education and welfare severely cut back.  Three weeks ago, just prior to the Easter vacation, contract negotiations between the government's adminstration of public schools, Kommunernes Landsforening (KL), and the teacher's union, Danmarks Lærerforening, broke down.  The government wants the teachers to work more hours, use less time to prepare for classes and all for less wages.  This goes against the common sense of what teaching is about, but the government's administrative agency  shut down the schools in an effort to force its agenda forth. 

Here, an English teacher from Copenhagen suburban grade school, Husum Skole, explains it, including how the poor and marginalized are getting poorer with ever fewer opportunities, while the wealthy few grow ever more rich and powerful in society.  This tendency to empower the wealthy by disempowering over a century of hard-fought worker's rights and unions is also being experienced in the US and much of the modern world.  But that it is occurring in Denmark, a supposed model for human welfare, is disturbing on many levels.

In solidarity with the teachers, the unions representing the Danish police, social workers, nurses and many other human welfare occupations are organizing support.