On 26th March 2014, members of the National Union of Teachers will be taking one-day national strike action over attacks on wages and conditions. John Pickard of the Mid-Essex NUT (personal capacity) looks at the reasons behind the upcoming strike and analyses the mood amongst teachers.
On 26th March 2014, members of the National Union of Teachers will be taking one-day national strike action over attacks on wages and conditions. It is disappointing, to say the least, that the NUT leadership has only now at last called a one-day national strike, six or seven weeks after the original date that had been mooted.
Members were expecting the call for some date between the end of January and the first two weeks of February and were eager to hit back at the government’s continual erosion of their wages and working conditions. What is much worse is that the leadership of the NASUWT have not agreed to call their own members out on the same date as the NUT and UCAC in Wales.
Disillusionment and anger
Like all other public sector workers, teachers are bitter and angry at the way they have been treated by the Tories. By the time of the next election, with wage freezes and now a miserly one per cent wage rise, our living standards will have fallen by around 15 per cent. In April, our superannuation payments are due to rise again by as much as two or three per cent (depending on the salary) – whipping away the one per cent we got in September. The Tories are giving with one hand and taking it away with the other.
Not surprisingly, there is a huge amount of disillusionment and anger among teachers at present. A recent YouGov poll showed that three quarters (74 per cent) of teachers say their morale has declined since the last general election. Half of teachers are less likely to stay in the profession as a result of changes to teachers’ pay and pensions, and 57 per cent are less likely to stay as a result of changes to teachers’ conditions.
Michael Gove proposed to the teachers’ pay review body that teachers’ guaranteed time for planning, preparation and assessment (PPA) will be eliminated or fragmented into such small time periods as to be useless. Where teachers currently work to a given number of school hours per year, Gove is proposing that this limit be removed so that longer working days and a longer working year become possible. These proposals were rejected, but we can be sure that Gove will come back again and again for these cuts.
Strike action
In October last year there were extremely successful regional strikes of members of the two big teaching unions, representing eighty per cent of all teachers, and that was something of a milestone in itself. But by the time of the upcoming NUT national one-day strike on 26th March, nearly five months have passed and there is a very serious danger that the anger that teachers feel will be dissipated in what is perceived to be infrequent and apparently disconnected one-day actions.
Day-in and day-out, week-in and week-out, teachers are enduring greater and greater pressures on their working conditions. Because there is now no national pay scale and so many schools have been ‘academised’ teaching unions are fighting rear-guard guerrilla actions in individual schools up and down the country to resist attempts to worsen pay scales and to protect career opportunities.
At a local level, many teachers are fighting rear-guard actions against the most blatant attempts to attack their wages and conditions – and often with success. For example, teachers at the Gateway sixth form college in Leicester recently began a series of regular strikes over excessive lesson observations. At Copland Community School in Wembley, west London, teachers struck over plans to turn the school into an academy. NUT and NASUWT members at the Dukeries Academy, Nottingham, also struck around the same time. Teachers at the Birchgrove Comprehensive in Swansea were also set to strike.
At the Abbey special school, Rotherham, teachers balloted to strike over threatened redundancies. Similarly in Barnsley, teachers at four schools for children with autism walked out over attacks on their conditions of work and pay.
In almost all of these cases, the teachers have threatened or are in fact conducting weekly strikes of one or two days, determined to defend their conditions and the needs of the pupils they teach.
All out on the 26th March!
The latest attack on teachers has come at the STEM 6 Academy, one of Gove’s flagship free schools in Islington, where teachers have taken strike action over the threat of a forced imposition of what is, in effect a ‘zero-hours’ contract. Teachers had been told that they “must” sign new contracts, which include the following conditions:
“The school reserves the right to temporarily lay you off from work without normal contractual pay or to reduce your normal working hours and reduce your pay proportionally”
Zero-hours contracts for teachers in a ‘free’ school. This is the thin end of a very long wedge, if Michael Gove has his way. NUT reps and members must make sure there is all-out support for the action on March 26th, with picket lines and leaflets aimed at parents and the public. NUT members should discuss with their NASUWT colleagues and urge them to support the action.
The two big unions need to ramp up the action through work-place meetings of NUT/NASUWT groups, local rallies and a series of national strikes increasing in regularity and length. This is the only way that members can be galvanised nationally and the Tories forced to retreat.
But the failure of the NASUWT leadership to support national action in March raises the vital question again of a single union for all teachers, something that is absolutely essential in the fight to defend teachers’ wages and conditions of service. Meantime the call must be: all out on the 26th!
