Professional Unity

WORKING WITH THE NASUWT – LESSONS FROM TLR ACTION IN ST.HELENS

Robin Pye (St.Helens NUT)

Two schools in St. Helens conducted formal strike ballots during the TLR campaign.

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Throughout the strike, it was the strikers themselves, who insisted on unity in action. As the NASUWT rep at the school often remarked, “Really, we should all be in one union”.

he first school was the secondary school with the largest NUT membership in the borough. During the course of the dispute the membership became even bigger with several teachers leaving the NASUWT to join the NUT and nearly all the NQT’s joining as well. The dispute ended in victory for the union with strike action being averted at the last minute as all our demands were met.

The second school was little Holy Spirit Catholic Primary School where teachers were evenly divided between the NUT and NASUWT. Members of both unions asked their local secretaries whether they could be balloted for strike action over a proposed TLR structure which would scrap three permanent MA’s and two temporary ones and replace them with two TLR’s that anybody on the staff could apply for.

The NASUWT had maintained locally that the TLR system would mean that all subject co-ordinators would now be paid additional allowances. However, at Holy Spirit, teachers would be expected to continue to co-ordinate subjects without any additional pay. They argued that the national ‘agreement’ was not being implemented properly. So they balloted their members as the NUT balloted its members because we were being faced with a salary cut.

Teachers took a total of ten days’ joint industrial action. The fact that we were in two separate unions threw up all sorts of practical difficulties during the dispute.

The employer was clearly encouraged to think that the strike would never take off because of the confused mixed messages given out by two unions with very different national agendas.

It became very difficult to agree tactics during the dispute. The NUT sought to agree everything at a strike committee made up of all the strikers and local officers. However, NASUWT regional and national officials would routinely try and overturn decisions made by the strike committee, without any attempt to co-ordinate at a regional or national level with the NUT.

Although local officers found it easy to agree joint statements to the press and joint leaflets to be distributed to parents on the picket line, the NASUWT regional and national officials insisted on producing their own leaflets and making their own statements to the press which ignored the role of the NUT.

Throughout the strike, it was the strikers themselves, who insisted on unity in action. As the NASUWT rep at the school often remarked, “Really, we should all be in one union”.

The dispute ended with two clear victories; slimmed down job descriptions for teachers not in receipt of TLR payments and half a day non-contact time on top of PPA time for TLR postholders.

Crucially, unlike most other local primary schools, teachers at Holy Spirit not in receipt of TLRs will no longer have to co-ordinate subjects. They will not be accountable for the teaching of pupils other than their own, they will not have to monitor pupils’ work from other classes, write action plans or internal or external review documents. This victory is already being used, alongside the national workload campaign, to push for similar improvements in other primary schools in St. Helens. Unfortunately, there will still be a net reduction in the number of teachers receiving additional allowances. Whereas last year five teachers were paid MAs, under the new structure, only two will be paid TLRs.

A lack of support from the NASUWT was crucial in undermining the NUT’s ability to negotiate a better settlement in this respect. Jerry Bartlett, NASUWT Deputy General Secretary, who led the negotiations for his union, told governors that ‘NASUWT has no problem with teachers losing salary as part of the transition to the new structure’ and ‘the system of management allowances did not work’.

Taking the positives out of the strike, it is clear that neither union would have won anything for its members if they had not worked together with the other union. The insistence of members of both unions that the unions work together was absolutely correct. It is also clear that if the two unions had worked more closely together, they would have won much more for members.

Once you have two unions working closely together and achieving much more for their members, the logical and obvious question, ‘Why not become one big union?’ is bound to follow.

The present leadership of the NASUWT has no interest in professional unity. During the Holy Spirit dispute, they went to extraordinary lengths to maintain their separateness from the NUT even when their own members and the logic of the position demanded the opposite approach. The pressure for professional unity within the NASUWT will come from elsewhere, from activists and members who can see what the benefits of one union for all teachers will bring on the ground.

To undermine the policy of social partnership which provides the cover for recent attacks on teachers’ terms and conditions, we need to reach out to and encourage those elements in the NASUWT who are already deeply unhappy with the deals their leadership is negotiating on their behalf. It is these NASUWT members that need to be won over to the idea of one democratic union taking action for teachers.

That is why the NUT call for one union for all teachers will only ever be accepted if it is combined with a willingness to take action on behalf of teachers. It is when they are taking action that teachers stop regarding professional unity as a nice theoretical idea and start thinking of it as an essential prerequisite for victory in the workplace and nationally.

When the present leadership of the NASUWT defend their policy of social partnership, they have two main arguments. Firstly, they point to all the benefits of the workforce remodelling agenda they can find; PPA time, the list of 24 tasks, limits to cover etc. etc. Secondly, they imply that all the bad things; tighter performance pay regulations, teachers losing management allowances, classes being taught by non-teachers etc. are all things that would have happened anyway. Thus, so their argument goes, we should all be grateful for the NASUWT leadership for the way in which they have negotiated improvements that would never have been achieved if the NASUWT had stayed out of talks with the government, as the NUT did.

The great big ‘What if?’ question which they do not want to be asked is, ‘What would have happened if the teaching unions had stayed united in opposition to government attacks on teachers’ pay and conditions and threatened action to support an agreed national negotiation position?

Keeping teachers divided in separate unions and the policy of social partnership with all its concomitant attacks on teachers’ pay and conditions go together, well, like peas and carrots. Once you have decided that remaining a separate union and refusing to work closely with the larger union for fear of being swallowed up by them is the keystone of your policy, social partnership becomes your only option.

Similarly, the call for one union for all teachers, really only makes any sense for teachers if it is combined with a vision for how a larger union will use its strength to negotiate a better deal for teachers backed up by a stronger and more credible strike threat.

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‘One union for all teachers’ suddenly makes a lot more sense when unions take collective action

ost teachers will agree that ‘one union for all teachers’ makes sense, but normally it does not make enough sense to do anything about it. If teachers regard their union essentially as an insurance company that provides support and cover if you get into difficulties as an individual, then one union for all teachers is not really that important.

In fact, it could be argued that the teacher looking for an insurance company type union may actually feel that he or she is better served by a situation where there are a number of unions competing for his or her custom allowing teachers to switch union depending on factors like, how good they think the local rep is, what special offers they have and so on.

‘One union for all teachers’ suddenly makes a lot more sense when unions take collective action, or negotiate on the basis of having a credible threat of strike action. In this situation, every division is a weakness that undermines the unions’ negotiation position.

Teachers know that action will only succeed where there is sufficient unity to support it. When our members can truly say to their colleagues in other unions, ‘Join the NUT because your membership of that other union undermines our ability to negotiate better terms and conditions in school and nationally,’ then we will start to see startling growth in our membership.

If the membership growth measured in those schools where we took action over TLRs was happening nationally, the leadership of the smaller unions would be really feeling the heat now.

So professional unity and taking action go together like peas and carrots too. However, as well as recruiting members from other unions, we need to be raising the question of professional unity in the most effective way possible.

The NASUWT leadership has had major difficulties selling the benefits of their social partnership deals to a layer of their activists who in turn reflect the disquiet from some of their members. The leadership are having to promise these activists that they can take action to ‘make sure the national agreement is implemented properly.’ It is to this layer of activists that the professional unity message has to be aimed. That message is, ‘We could achieve so much more if we join together.’ And as well as saying it, we need to demonstrate it.

Depending on the decisions made by this year’s Annual NUT Conference, there will be a range of local and national action agreed for the next year. All action should be accompanied by an appeal to members of the other unions to join us, either as a body, or as individual members of the expanding NUT. As part of our campaign, there is a real opportunity to recruit to our campaign for professional unity those NASUWT activists who are fed up with the shoddy deals made from a position of weakness by the NASUWT leadership. As they call for a change in direction for their union, we can be encouraging them to look anew at the possibilities of professional unity built on action.