Great Britain's National Union of Teachers (NUT)... Saving Our Schools on Both Side of the Atlantic
The opposition to the attack on public schools is alive and well in both London and Chicago. On July 20, 2010 hundreds of teachers, students and parents joined the National Union of Teachers to protest budget cuts and attacks on public schools. It turns out that the Chicago Teachers Union is not too shabby in comparison, we also championed the “Save Our Schools” motto and brought out over four thousands people in a similar action on May 25th, 2010.
British teachers. Photo by Jackson Potter.This summer I received a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to study the Industrial Revolution in England. As a result, I was able to catch up with an officer and rank and file members in the NUT, England’s largest teachers union and sixth largest union overall.
One indication of the type of union that the NUT has become (reformers have been in power for the last 2 years) when I called their headquarters and asked the receptionist to speak with someone at the office about their work, she asked “is there anyone in particular you’d like to talk to?” I responded “perhaps an organizer in your organizing department.” She answered confidently “we’re all organizers at the NUT,” and proceeded to forward me to the president’s secretary.
Current Struggles
A few emails later I had the opportunity to speak with author and a joint divisional secretary of the NUT, Mary Compton and long-time Secretary of one of its largest branches and now Treasurer of the NUT, Ian Murch. Murch has run to head up the union twice, been expelled from the union once and was surprised to learn that his slate of teacher candidates won elections two years ago and now control most of the union’s major leadership positions. Currently they are in the throes of a pitched battle with the newly elected Conservative government around a reform process known as Academies. Under the previous Blair and Brown administrations, the Labor Party proposed and began to create 200 Academies throughout England.
According to Murch, Academy Schools create independent school administrative authorities that often have business sponsors who can determine pay rates, conditions, curriculum, parent involvement (if any), etc. Academies are very similar to charters in that they appear to offer parents more choice but deprive communities and teachers of any input in the education of their children. While these semi-public schools are currently mandated to be non-profit, before the Conservatives came to power they were in conversation with the for-profit company Edison, in an effort to mimic the failed education reform fads of North America.
Approximately eighteen Academies (out of 200) have outright refused to recognize the right of their teachers to unionize. However, thanks to a number of passionate actions and mobilizations, locals throughout the country have forced a number of business sponsors to back out of their support for the Academies.
The Conservatives have also withdrawn billions of dollars in funding promised for the repair of derelict schools. Mary Compton said that in Wales “cuts are awful” and both her and Ian emphasized that the English were facing the worst cuts in public spending in the last ninety years. Teachers expect a pay freeze from 2011 to 2013. While the NUT has pushed to ensure fair compensation for their members, English teacher pay rates are not part of the collective bargaining agreement, they are set by the government.
Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: “Current proposals will undermine properly accountable local authority education provision.We need a good local school for every child, working within the local family of schools. The NUT will seek to work with other teachers’ organisations to attain this goal.”
Internal Democracy
All senior members that the union hires are appointed by an executive committee of 43 people and the General Secretary (their equivalent of our president) does not get to vote. This was decided, in part, because their former General Secretary, Doug McAvoy used his post to promote himself through the use of the union’s machinery.
As a result of these reforms the rank and file of the NUT have been able to implement policies voted on by their members. Previously, members would vote for strong and aggressive policies, but the union refused to implement them. Now members regularly pass their own motions in their general house meetings; recently passing a resolution declaring solidarity with the Palestinian people. Murch suggested that unions “have to have a renewal process to stop leaders from losing touch with their members.” Enhanced and increased union democracy is a giant step in the right direction.
Additionally, there are no obscene pay schemes for officers or union employees in the NUT; nearly every employee will receive less than $75,000.00 a year for their efforts.
They have also begun to create a more robust organizing department. Recently a number of organizers were hired to recruit and organize in various locals throughout the country and eventually they plan to assign one organizer to each region.
Although Murch thinks these reforms move the union in the right direction, they are not going to be entirely successful at pushing back “neoliberal reforms….there is not a different government in the horizon so we’ll have to work with the consequences of this one for awhile.” Mary Compton proposed a way of bypassing governments altogether. Throughout the discussion she emphasized the need to conduct international solidarity campaigns with teachers throughout the globe who are experiencing many of the same attacks and effectively resist any attempts to destabilize our public schools.
International Solidarity
Compton insists that unions must take more interest in what is happening in the global South, “we desperately need a global approach.” She also described the World Bank’s new attack on teachers in Africa, calling for the dismissal of most teachers in that part of the world because they are absent too much, fail to do their jobs properly and steal school materials. Meanwhile, the report makes little mention of how AIDS and poverty undermines and challenges the role of teachers in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. The attacks are even more vicious than the ones faced by teachers in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, but we rarely hear about them.
Mary, Ian and I talked about the future possibility of targeting the World Bank for an international action for its blatant hostility toward teachers and their unions. In the NUT, one percent of their entire budget is committed to support teacher organizations in other countries. Let’s hope this conversation across the Atlantic was a sign of good things to come for global teachers unions fighting back together against what ails us all.
