NUT must take action alongside support staff on October 14th

NUT must take action alongside support staff on October 14^th

As expected Unison, GMB and Unite have announced further strike action to secure a genuine pay rise for their low-paid local government members, including school support staff. They will take their next action on October 14^th and there should be more workers involved in this action as Unison intend to ballot members in academy chains who were not involved in the July 10^th strike. As one of the key unions involved in the July 10^th action it is essential that the NUT calls our next action to coincide with this national strike. Apart from the opportunity to co-ordinate with the country’s biggest unions we cannot surely fail to grasp the potential to make a greater impact by acting alongside our support staff colleagues.

You would think that the common sense of this approach would need little or no argument. The NUT continues to pursue our three-year campaign to defend pensions and national pay and to link these issues with quality education for all young people. Our recent annual conference reasserted the importance of co-ordinating the action part of this campaign with other unions, in particular school staff unions. How could we miss such an opportunity? Unfortunately it may not be so straightforward. The NUT Conference also agreed to run a full-scale consultation of members on the next stages in our campaign, including the levels of action members would support, and to start this following the July 10^th strikes.

We now know that this consultation (known as ‘the big conversation’) will start in early September via a mailing in the Teacher magazine and continue until October 23^rd when a special meeting of the Executive will consider the responses before debating the next steps. So the consultation will be in process on October 14^th when our fellow unions take their next action. There is no reason why this should prevent the NUT from taking action with them. We already have a mandate in our national ballots and the decision by conference to seek as a matter of priority to co-ordinate with other unions strengthens that in this case. In fact our Conference policy specifies that we are ‘seeking to co-ordinate with other education and public sector unions where possible and showing flexibility to any timescales they may have". It will also seem (and indeed be) bizarre to members if we remain at work, crossing picket lines on a day when support workers who we walked out alongside in July are on strike. Nevertheless I expect there will be many on the Executive who will see the ongoing consultation as a reason to abstain from joint action in October.

There is clearly no technical reason why we cannot take action on October 14^th with Unison, GMB and Unite. A circular to Executive members from the General Secretary on August 28^th stated that ‘colleagues on the Executive will have views about whether we could call action on October 14^th saying that the consultation is about action beyond that date, or whether we should wait for the results of the consultation before calling further action. This can be discussed on 5^th Sept at the special executive’.  If we fail to strike with school and local authority colleagues we would therefore need significant reasons to think it would weaken rather than strengthen our campaign. It is hard to think of any plausible way in which it would do that.

I will be arguing for the NUT to take action on October 14^th side-by-side with the other unions. It would be an irresponsible waste of an opportunity to do anything else. Our action is measured by its success in closing or partially closing schools and there is no doubt that teachers and support staff (including caretakers) together will be more effective in delivering those closures than either group would be alone. It is also the case that teachers are better organised and more heavily unionised than support staff and, therefore, our abstention on October 14^th would significantly reduce their confidence and the impact of their action.  Joint action can also continue to pose questions for our colleagues in the other teacher unions- in particular why, if they continue to oppose the pay and pension reforms and have a mandate to take action, they refuse to be part of a growing campaign of co-ordinated action by millions of workers on the same issues. Abstention, on the other hand, simply makes us look divided and disorganised.

NUT members and local associations should contact their Executive members before the September 5^th meeting and urge them to support any proposal to ensure that the Union takes action alongside our teaching assistants, mentors, admin and other colleagues on October 14^th. That day’s action must be as good as, if not better than, July 10^th.