Building Up Resistance to the GERM

Building Up Resistance to the GERM

On Saturday May 24th the NUT hosted a conference of some 100 members to consider the global attack on state education and teacher unions. This was by some distance the best international event the Union has held in my memory. For one thing it was worthwhile and meaningful because of what it wasn't. This was not, for example, a call to celebrate the progressive policies of otherwise autocratic and anti-union regimes or movements. This was not a carnival of populism. Nor was it an event where we were urged to petition and lobby the ruling classes of the world to be nicer to the developed world and provide some semblance of an education to the poor. No, this was different and refreshing. This was about solidarity.

Global Education 'Reform': Building Resistance and Solidarity (the title says it all) was organised around the principle that we should learn from the actual experiences of teacher trade unionists who have been and remain at the forefront of the fight to defend education from the GERM. After a brief plenary overview from Professor Susan Roberts of Bristol University we were offered the choice of eight workshops run, for the most part, by participants in the global resistance to neo-liberal education policies. Time allowed each of us to attend just three but all looked valuable and interesting. The sessions were genuinely global dealing with Ecuador, Sweden, Venezuela, Greece, India, Chicago, Mexico.

To come away with more hope than despair I should have reversed the order of my choices. The session on the Chicago Teachers Union was led by Kristine, a young teacher activist who became involved in her union because it was failing abjectly to defend the city's schools from closure and privatisation. Worse than that the union was led by people close to the very Democrat political machine responsible for the 'reform' agenda, people far more inclined to sell these policies than resist them. During the course of the teachers' struggle their opponents (Arne Duncan, Rahm Emanuel) became more rather than less powerful given their closeness to the Chicago-based first African-American President, Barack Obama. Against all these odds (a compliant union, powerful opponents) Chicago teachers set about organising to fight back. In a theme that was common in all the sessions I attended they had to take on their union so that they could more effectively take on their employers and political bosses. The lessons for militants in the UK are many. The transformation of the CTU started from the bottom up when activists got together to organise the Caucus of Radical Educators (CORE). They took their fight out into the community organising among parent and students to win the political arguments. They ensured that they were seen as the experts on education in the city producing an alternative vision in their handbook 'The Schools Chicago Students Deserve'. And crucially they used this painstaking organisational and campaigning work to set the ground work for a serious industrial action strategy which was designed from the start not to protest but to win. The inspiring story of how they did this can be found on their own website www.ctunet.com.

The session on Mexico echoed some of these themes but in a less hopeful vein. The Mexican teachers union has a history of corruption and political cronyism. Its leaders explicitly promoted neo-liberal reforms in alliance with the ruling parties. The most prominent recent leader Elba Esther Gordillo was recently imprisoned for embezzlement but her downfall was more to do with political score-settling within the ruling class than self-assertion by her members. There is a growing and courageous opposition within the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) but the speaker was  very sober about the chances of an imminent transformation. Of 52 regions in the union the opposition CNTE controls just 5. Alternative education for the poorest Mexicans is often organised and delivered in areas outside government control, eg the Zapatistas University of the Earth.

On the basis that I knew little about it I rounded off with India. I left this session doubting the extent to which any of the teacher unions were really independent in any meaningful sense. All are connected to one of the major political parties. The biggest, which is linked to the Left party, appears to have very limited local organisation under the national facade. The only hope for teachers facing that kind of barrier is organisation from  below and the stimulus this gets from the conditions at work and the lived experience of members on the ground and the communities they work in. If there is no meaningful local structure or means of engagement the prospects for resistance are so much harder. Not impossible though; people create their own structures where there are none and even in India there were signs of hope.

The day finished with some remarks from Lois Weiner, adviser to the Chicago Teachers amongst others and Professor of Education at New Jersey City University. A summary of Lois's comments can be seen here (http://newpol.org/content/reimagining-and-remaking-union-solidarity). She argued for a dynamic and bold approach to resistance encompassing, parents, students, the wider community served by public/state schools and educationalists who oppose the neo-liberal education project. I was pleased that she took the opportunity to counsel the NUT to move beyond one day protests and to consider bolder tactics, mentioning in particular the idea of extended school occupations with parents 'making schools sites of human emancipation'.

It was a real breath of fresh air and worth giving up the first Saturday of the half-term to see 100 NUT members engaging with such radical, transformative and at the same time concrete ideas. The message here was neither that everything is grim and hopeless nor that we are on the brink of victory if only we could learn from x. Instead we are involved in a titanic and multi-faceted struggle of immense importance to the future of children across the world and we need to remain in touch with each other and learn from each other constantly if we are to win it. We also need to start out understanding how important it is and believing we can win.

Patrick Murphy