Sean McCauley, NEU executive member (personal capacity)
50,000 new members since the 16 January National Education Union (NEU) ballot announcement for strike action! When a union gives a fighting lead, union strength builds.
Hundreds of thousands of members took national strike action on 1 February: teachers in England, and teachers and support staff in Wales. Thousands marched on the streets of Bristol, Birmingham, Leeds, Oxford, and many other places. 50,000 marched in London.
We were joined by civil service PCS members, University and College Union (UCU) members, and RMT and Aslef train drivers, in the biggest show of union strength in England and Wales since the two million-strong public sector general strike over pensions in November 2011.
Following this, NEU members are taking rolling regional strike action between 28 February and 2 March, with regional rallies.
Under pressure and desperate to head off the strikes, the Tory government made overtures to the NEU leadership, begging us to call off our action.
But no new offer was on the table for this year’s pay award. Nor was any extra funding put forward to offset the shortfall from the unfunded, below-inflation award imposed on us last September. To add insult to injury, moments after asking us to call our action off, the government announced a pay award for September 2023 that is 7% below projected RPI inflation. The strikes will continue.
Bold lead
The NEU National Executive (NEC) met on 25 February. Socialist Party members proposed a clear timescale for escalation, should the government fail to meet our demands for fully funded, backdated inflation-matching awards for this year and next.
The next stage is the 15 and 16 March national strikes, with assemblies in London and Cardiff on Budget Day.
Socialist Party members called for the 15 March London event to be built as it was originally intended: a national demonstration and rally, jointly with other striking unions, timed to coincide with Jeremy Hunt’s Budget Day speech in parliament.
Some in the union are seeking to present it as a carnival with merry-go-rounds and stilt-walkers. We argued that it needs to be a serious trade union event, to send a clear message that our members won’t settle for anything less than what we have already demanded. That’s what members are expecting.
Socialist Party executive members also said that the NEU should be at the forefront of calling for coordinated strike action with as many unions with live ballots as possible joining us. Socialist Party executive members signed an open letter from executive members of the NEU and PCS, addressed to other unions with live strike ballots, to join us in mobilising our members nationwide, and organise with us for a demonstration in central London on 15 March.
Lay control
The recent eagerness of the national officers to postpone the Valentine’s Day strike action in Wales, after the Welsh Labour-led government tabled an offer that was far from what we have been calling for, was worrying. The Welsh government’s offer was soundly rejected by 91% at a meeting of reps, but the action should never have been suspended; the offer was clearly unsatisfactory. The action was quickly reinstated for 2 March.
Socialist Party members on the executive successfully saw off a decision that would have resulted in any future offers being decided by a small group of officers. We supported a move that decisions on any government offer that could potentially warrant suspension of action be put to the full executive.
We went further and proposed that the wider membership should be consulted where practicably possible on such decisions. Recent decisions by the general secretaries of the RCN and UCU to suspend action without proper consultation with the wider membership have led to anger in those unions. We were unsuccessful this time but will bring forward similar proposals at the March executive.
The undemocratic Tory anti-trade union laws prevented our support staff members from striking with their teacher colleagues in England, because the turnout threshold was narrowly missed by just 1,500 votes. We have over 50,000 support staff members now, an increase of 7,500 since 16 January. Three quarters of those were not previously in a union. And that’s without an active recruitment campaign.
Support staff reballot
Socialist Party executive members have consistently had to argue that NEU should take a serious stance in representing its support staff members, some of the lowest-paid workers in education.
With this year’s inadequate government pay proposals only just announced, NEU should seek a joint campaign with Unison, GMB and Unite, to stand together to reject an award that goes nowhere near toward addressing the desperately low pay our termtime-only, often part-time, members face. We joined the push on the executive to re-ballot our support staff members ‘as soon as possible’, and this has been adopted.
The current generation of children has already suffered enough as a result of Covid. We are fighting for a future for education that means that school budgets fully meet the needs of all our pupils, that there are no further cuts that impact on their education, and that experienced teachers and new entrants, a third of whom leave after five years, are no longer forced from the profession as a result of a toxic mix of workload and shortfalls in pay.
