High School Teachers Demonstrate, Demand Salary Equalization

This article by Laura Poy Solano originally appeared in the October 28, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

Mexico City. Leaders of the National Front of Upper Secondary Education Unions (FNSEMS) demanded that the Congress allocate an additional 2 billion pesos to achieve salary equalization for high school workers and teachers.

At a press conference outside the National Palace, they called on the federal government to “not fall into the game of passing the buck” in the allocation of public funds and to address the demands for salary increases and permanent status for thousands of workers in the sector.

Ramón Gastelum, president of the Cecytes Federation, stated that last year, “they promised us that these resources would be channeled, as was done in the 2023-2024 school year, but it was a deception. That is why today we have come to the doors of the National Palace to demand that President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo listen to us and comply with the agreement reached in 2023.”

He emphasized that they will march to the Chamber of Deputies, where they will demand that the chairs of the Education and Finance committees meet with them. They added that if their demands are not met, “we are prepared to take action until our demands are heard.” They stated that “we will block the accesses to San Lázaro until our demands are heard.”

Gastelum reported that if there is no progress in Congress, the FNSEMS is “calling for a national work stoppage that will impact more than two million students in the country. That is why we want a just demand to be met, because in most of the country’s high school subsystems, poverty wages are far from the work performed on a daily basis, and even typist positions are still being paid, when typewriters no longer exist.”

The march to San Lázaro is expected to begin in a few minutes.