April 2008 was a great success. Leicestershire NUT and City NUT had a terrific joint rally at the Athena Centre in Leicester. There were speeches, music and a very funny routine from Mark Steel. Everybody had a great time.
And events like this took place all over the country.
Media coverage was mixed. Some was favourable, and some was more critical. Only to be expected.
The strike was followed by a Lobby of Parliament in early June, and some Leicestershire MPs signed Early Day Motion 742.
This kind of continuing pressure will be needed even more now that the country faces a recession, with the voices of right wing politics continuing to use this as an excuse to attack the very idea of public services and public sector workers.
WHO DECIDES YOUR PAY?
Your pay should be decided by negotiations between teacher unions and your employers, local authorities. But its not, of course.
The principle of free collective bargaining has been abolished for teachers in this country. We do not negotiate our pay. This denial of a fundamental right guaranteed under a variety of international agreements is a travesty, and firmly places the UK in a group of very unsavoury countries indeed.
As far back as 1949, the UK signed ILO Convention 98, Article 4 of which stated that
"Measures appropriate to national conditions shall be taken, where necessary, to encourage and promote the full development and utilisation of machinery for voluntary negotiation between employers or employers' organisations and workers' organisations, with a view to the regulation of terms and conditions of employment by means of collective agreements."
This commitment is currently denied to teachers and other groups of public sector workers in the UK. Shameful.
Rather than collective agreements decided through voluntary negotiation, the UK has the profoundly undemocratic STRB.
The School Teachers' Review Body consists of the following members:
Dr Anne Wright, CBE
Jennifer Board
Monojit Chaterji
Dewi Jones
Elizabeth Kidd
Esmond Lindop
Bruce Warman
Anne Watts, CBE
If you've never heard of these people, that's not surprising. The list above is from The Office of Manpower Economics, a non-statutory body which provides a secretariat for the six pay review bodies established for public sector workers.
The Chair of the STRB is appointed by the Prime Minister, and other members are appointed by the Secretary of State for Education (the body is supposed to be independent of Government!!!). The Chair gets £350 per day, while other members pull in £300 per day. Clearly, not having free collective bargaining with our employers comes at a price!
You can read about these people here.
FAIR PAY FOR TEACHERS
Fair Pay for teachers is a continuing campaign for the NUT, both nationally and locally in Leicestershire.
We know that the current recession makes this difficult, but we intend to make the Government honor its pledges and agreements, and not renage on this in order to make further cuts in pay when teacher pay is falling in real terms thanks to inflation.
Teacher pay is also inevitably connected to wider debates about pubic services and the nature of public sector pay.
What is clear is that it is unacceptable to expect public sector workers, including teachers, to pay for a recession that they did not cause. In case we forget, or before history is completely rewritten, this recession was caused entirely by the banking sector. The banks were then bailed out by the public, via huge subsidies which are the real cause of the deficit facing the country.
As noted above, teacher pay continues to fall in real terms because inflation is running higher than the awards made by the School Teachers Review Board - and also remember that teachers have not had negotiating rights since 1988. This failure to negotiate pay and conditions with free and independent trade unions represents a shameful episode in British history, and one which has been allowed to continue by a Labour Government which often criticises other countries for doing precisely what it allows and, indeed, celebrates.