Teachers' strike

I'm sitting in the almost empty staffroom of my West London school, finishing off some marking, as most of my colleagues are out on the streets protesting. Strange that. I never thought of myself as a strike breaker.

I simply didn't get my act together to join the teacher's union after moving back here a few months ago, and now they're swamped with requests for people to renew memberships, with the strike action starting. Seems like teachers are keen to be in a union when it gets them out of school.

Funnily enough, this is still a view held across the UK. Last night when we went for dinner to celebrate a colleague's birthday, someone started railing against strike action, and complaining that she had a 10 hour workday while others were out parading on a street for more pay. She wanted them to deduct their day's pay and remunerate her for her extra work, or so she quipped, at the top of her bellowing voice, across the restaurant. Playing right into the hands of Labour government's rhetoric, she saw striking as just another way to skive off a day of school. No political significance, nobody taking risks in order to improve conditions for everyone else, just plain laziness.

The fact of the matter is that this strike is not about getting more money. Essentially, the government is proposing a pay increase which is below the current inflation rate, and has done so for two years running already. So this effectively amounts to a fairly hefty pay cut, since prices rise, and our salaries don't match that rise. To quote Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers:

“The Retail Price Index, which features on Government websites as the figure used for pay bargaining, is currently running at a yearly average of 4.1%. The current pay offer of 2.45% is well below that and can be seen in no other way than as a pay cut.

“Year on year pay that fails to keep pace with inflation has real consequences for the profession and our schools. It saps morale and causes problems of recruitment, retention and teacher shortages, not to mention real financial difficulty for our members. It is time to call a halt.

“Real term pay cuts hit youngest teachers the hardest. Not only do they have to contend with high housing costs, fuel bills and escalating food prices, they also have to pay back student loans at a rate of 4.8%.

(www.teachers.org.uk)

So this is about a profession which is a benchmark for a lot of others, which is slowly having its salaries eroded. The knock-on effect of allowing this to happen is that doctors, academics, civil servants, and pretty much anybody whose job is related to the government is going to have a harder time keeping up a decent standard of living, if Labour gets away with cutting teachers' salaries. I don't argue that I should be earning the same as somebody working a tough, dog-eat-dog business job, who can be 'let go' because of a downturn in the market, nor even that my job has the same social significance as a General Practitioner. But when you know that a starting lawyer earns well over twice what I earn after 5 years on the job, or that a starting GP earns well over three times my salary, then something is out of joint.

A whole load of other unions are following the NUT's lead and announcing strike action over pay issues, which is a first in recent years in this country. I can only breathe a sigh of relief that people are mustering up the courage. It's harder than it seems to face a group of kids and tell them you're choosing not to teach them...

The attitudes towards striking are very rife in my current school. Arguments break out between teachers who see striking as troublemaking, and those who are so involved in this that they won't accept they are also being manipulated by a union.

One way or another, it's great to see these debates coming out in a country where, as I mentioned in my previous post, people are willing to put up with the most ludicrous inequalities or dysfunctions in government, and see protest as being childish or confrontational (as though these struggles can be resolved without confrontation...). Teachers have had pretty much any authority over their curriculum taken away in the past decade, and have had little or no say in the way that schools have been run over the past 20 years. I can't think of any other profession which has seen so much change with so little consultation as British teachers have, and for once that they stand up and are counted in this struggle to stop their basic salaries from being chewed away inconspicuously, they are railed against and branded...

It's about time I put my money where my mouth is, and sorted out that NUT membership so I can proudly get the hell out of this staff room if another strike day is set...!