Fight on for inflation-proof pay rises
NEU NEC members Sean McCauley, Sheila Caffrey, Louise Cuffaro, Nicky Downes, Steve Scott (personal capacity)
The National Executive (NEC) of the National Education Union (NEU) has voted, by 44 votes to 22, to recommend acceptance of the government’s latest pay offer, a 6.5% increase for September 2023. There is now an online consultation of members running until 28 July.
The five Socialist Party members on the executive voted against this recommendation and are campaigning for a ‘No’ vote in the consultation.
Accepting the deal means accepting two more years of pay cuts.
NEU members have taken determined strike action for good reason. Teachers’ pay in England has fallen by over 20% in real terms since 2010.
Nothing more offered for 2022
We started this dispute because last September’s award was just 5%, still correctly described on the NEU website as “another huge real-terms pay cut”.
6.5% for 2023 is yet another pay cut
With RPI inflation currently running at 11.3%, this is effectively another 5% pay cut. Even the government’s own CPI inflation measure is more than this, at 8.7%.
The general secretaries are claiming the deal should be accepted as it is the “largest-ever recommendation” from the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB). But we’re also facing the “largest-ever” inflation rates since the STRB began! It’s a lot less than teachers in Scotland have won, leaving their main scale £7,000 better than ours.
At the same time, the Tories have announced that they will be accepting the pay review bodies’ recommendations in all sectors where they exist. That includes police and prison officers being offered 7% and doctors 6%.
But this has only happened because the Tories have been put under massive pressure. So now is the time to increase that pressure – we can win more!
Not fully funded
The deal is being sold to members as ‘fully funded’ but we are yet to see figures which show clearly what the funding position is. The Tories are ‘reprioritising’ to fund 3% – and Sunak proposed increasing racist charges on migrants to pay towards it – but schools are expected to find the rest out of existing budgets. That will mean further cuts in many schools. The Tories know that, which is why they’ve also announced a £40 million ‘hardship fund’, but that’s just a few hundred pounds each when divided up over thousands of schools.
Members should vote reject and join us in arguing at the NEC and throughout the union for a bold, serious, escalating fight in the autumn! The majority grouping in the current leadership of the NEU is the ‘NEU Left’, whose members have split over this issue. However, this development shows that it is now necessary to start to build a new left in the union, to campaign for a fighting programme and hold the leadership to account.
The junior doctors, hospital consultants, radiographers, rail workers and others are still fighting. The strike wave is not over and we can win more from this crisis-ridden Tory government.
