Teachers Unity 2013 No1

Unity! www.communist-party.org.uk

Easter 2013

The war on teachers affects us all

by Gawain Little The privatisation of the education system through the academy and "free" school initiatives is already beginning to wreak havoc on our schools. Local authorities are struggling to cope with reduced budgets, as money is siphoned off to support the privatisation of schools, and services are being cut left, right and centre.

Delegation of budgets means that local authorities are no longer retaining funds to support schools in crisis situations such as flooding or fire, let alone to offer services

such as behaviour support, school improvement and ethnic minority achievement services.

It is in this context that the attack on teachers' terms and conditions must be understood.

The tearing up of pensions agreements, to make services more attractive to “alternative providers”, has been followed by the proposals for the destruction of national pay.

Existing pay scales will be replaced with a system of performance-related pay decided through appraisal at school level.

This is despite strong evidence from the OECD and others that PRP does not improve results. But then this has never been

INSIDE A chance to change our future Bill Greenshields on the People’s Assembly Time to regain union freedom Dan Thompson on anti union laws People before profit Rob Griffiths on building a people’s economy

about improving outcomes for children and young people. The effective deregulation of teachers' pay at a time when school budgets are frozen or shrinking will ensure that school-level decisions are taken in the context of austerity.

The reality is that schools faced with budget cuts, decreasing support from the local authority and with increasing competition from academies and "free" schools will be pressured into holding down pay to resource underfunded areas.

In case some schools are not willing to play the game, OFSTED has been given the role of policing the new arrangements to prevent “pay inflation”.

Similarly, the removal of portability will mean that teachers find themselves competing at interview for who can do the job on the lowest salary.

In the future, teachers moving schools or taking a career break may well find themselves starting at or near the bottom of the scale in each new job.

This will have a disproportionate impact on women teachers, who are statistically more likely to take a career break, and constitutes a further attack on women in a profession where average pay is already deeply unequal.

It is clear why we must oppose these proposals and why further strike action by teachers is inevitable if the government refuses to change course.

But it should also be clear why our response, and our action, must have the greatest possible impact.

By delegating pay decisions to school level and removing a national system for the determination of teachers' pay, the government is introducing a key market mechanism into the education system.

It is another step on the road to full privatisation of our schools.

With this in mind, we have no option but to build the broadest, most effective, most determined resistance. And that means the teacher unions working together. Standalone action by a single union will have a far smaller chance of defeating the government and protecting our schools.

It is the duty of all those who want to stop this government to work for united action.

Gawain Little is secretary of Oxfordshire NUT and a member of the NUT national executive

People before profit

Time to regain union freedom

by Robert Griffiths

by Dan Thompson This weekend we meet as trade unionists to discuss the ways forward for our unions, our schools, our students and our colleagues.

Yet we face increasing attacks on our rights as trade unionists. These attacks started with the raft of legislation introduced by the openly anti-union Thatcher government.

Successive governments have done little or nothing to repeal it.

The coalition government have continued this onslaught on trade union rights through attacks on maternity rights, health and safety protection at work and the right to an employment tribunal. This, coupled with the push for over 50% turnout in union ballots in order to take industrial action - from a government elected on a 36% (Con) and 23% (LD) turnout - and threats to facilities time, has changed the landscape for us as trade unionists.

We need to take decisive action to regain the freedoms the union movement fought for and which protect our members. We should welcome the formation of the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom which seeks to unite the trade union movement in defence of our rights. Similarly, we should be proud of the work done by the Institute of Employment Rights and others and should seek to deepen our links with such organisations.

As education unions, we also need to examine how we campaign and work within our local communities. In a time where educational legislation looks to rip schools from their local communities and to remove any sense of local accountability and representation, we must connect with those communities.

We must also develop a political expression of this broader community work.

We need to raise the profile of educational issues in local and national elections, giving a voice to those the coalition seeks to marginalise.

This should not be a question of standing or supporting particular candidates but about changing the landscape and theatre of debate to make the issues which matter to our members, and the communities in which they work, a real priority. Through this work, we will build a strong movement to face the challenges thrown at us by this government.

Dan Thompson is secretary of Windsor & Maidenhead NUT

A chance to change our future

by Bill Greenshields The People’s Assembly Against Austerity is a response to calls from a number of trade unions – including in the first instance Unite – the Coalition of Resistance, the People’s Charter and many others to mount a serious challenge to the bankers' agenda and subject it to public scrutiny, when it will be found wanting in every respect.

Austerity ttacks on working people will not go unchallenged. We will resist the theft and privatisation of our national resources and public services; the continuing undermining of trade unions rights and freedom and the attacks on the most vulnerable all of which rip the heart out of local communities.

The government and its henchmen in the mass media perpetuate the myth that understanding the economy is far too complicated for the ‘ordinary’ woman and man so we should leave it the ‘experts’ – the bankers, economists, media pundits and politicians – whose system created this damnawful mess in the first place.

We need to be brainwashed to believe that, even though we are suffering, cuts and unemployment are inevitable and necessary and anyway (because we can’t understand) there’s nothing we can do about it.

The tiny class of super-rich bankers and corporate monopolies running this country also need our response to the austerity regime to be fragmented and dislocated.

Thus the attacks on pay, pensions, rights at work, employment, benefits and public services are portrayed as separate industrial battles which are fought individually and not as what they are: various strands of an integrated class attack on everything Britain’s workers have won over the past 70 years.

So they sow artificial divisions. Public and private-sector workers. Industrial and service workers. Men and women, north and south, black and white, British citizens and migrants, those in work and the unemployed.

Most crucially they need trade union struggles to be separate from community and grass roots struggles, even when they so often involve the same individuals.

Anyone who argues for a coherent alternative is tagged as an unrealistic extremist. Every day the ruling class puppets in Parliament and the media pump out the same old stuff, designed to confuse, obfuscate, threaten, divide, ridicule and browbeat us into submission.

Working people are under a full-frontal assault in Britain as in the rest of Europe and beyond. In this country particularly we are deprived of a political voice. So it’s a ray of hope that trade unions, anti-cuts groups,

radical campaigns, community organisations and political parties are coming together for a People’s Assembly on Saturday 22 June.

The Assembly is a reassertion of the strength of the working class and its need for a political voice. It can help build a movement that might just turn the tide.

Will those taking part agree on every dot and comma of the way forward, in terms of objectives, tactics and strategy?

No – and that’s a good thing because if they did the assembly would not reflect the complexity and variety of views within the working class.

It’s vital that the assembly be representative of all sections of the British people and does not become the property of any political party or group. There will be, must be, real debate and argument – but in a process designed to unite and ignite the labour movement and deliver an outcome.

It should lead to stronger and more united trade unions determined to take on the battle in a strategic, co-ordinated way and to put themselves at the heart of communities seeking to defend themselves against the cuts. And it should help promote the radical alternative that the People’s Charter for Change demands – a people’s Britain, not a bankers’ Britain.

Bill Greenshields chairs the Communist Party and is the People’s Charter trade union officer

In cities, towns and villages across Britain, the cuts are beginning to bite.

For the past two years, the austerity programme devised by New Labour mainly affected capital projects.The construction industry and its contractors were hit, but most public services remained in place.

Now people are seeing their local libraries, day care centres, leisure facilities and other council services slashed or closed altogether.

As well as rising council tax bills and service charges, people are being mercilessly ripped off by the greedy tax-dodgers who own our gas, electricity and water utilities.

For example, British Gas have increased prices by 6 per cent, even though annual profits are up 11 per cent. Most of their 17m customers see no real increase in their incomes and many struggle to pay their bills.

It's a similar story in the water industry, where prices and profits are soaring – except at Welsh Water, a not-for-profit company.

The hardest hit are low-paid and public sector workers, the unemployed, single parents, carers and pensioners who rely on state benefits or the state pension for their subsistence. The majority in most of these categories are women.

The government's welfare state 'reforms' target many of the same people, together with the disabled. The benefit cap on working-age households will be rolled out from next month and most will also suffer a cut in housing benefit. In fact, most benefits will go down in real terms for at least two years. The 'bedroom tax' will hit tenants on housing benefit in all social housing.

The replacement of the Disability Living Allowance by the Personal Independence Payment is intended to slash financial support by 20 per cent over the next four years – for those not driven off it altogether.

The staged introduction of Universal Credit this year, in place of most means-tested benefits for the unemployed, low-paid and parents will make it simpler for governments to reduce public assistance at a stroke.

Yet we are only in the second year of what the Tories now intend to be a 7-year austerity regime. Where the last New Labour government planned to chop public spending by £123bn to 2015, the Con-Dem coalition has added £446bn of cuts and extended the punishment to 2018.

Prime Minister Cameron has recently repeated the bogus rationale for austerity, namely, that Britain's public spending deficit must be narrowed towards zero.

This has never been the government's real

agenda. At the behest of the City of London, which pressed for the formation of the unelected Con-Dem coalition in the first place, it is to dismantle and privatise Britain's public sector, including the welfare state.

Almost all the social gains made since 1945 are to be withdrawn.

Monopoly profits can then be made across the health and education sectors, especially in England. Taxes on the rich and corporate profits can be reduced still further. Wage levels can be driven down and trade unionism weakened.

That is why the labour movement must fight this austerity and privatisation drive through mass action, including selective, rolling and generalised strikes. Together with the left, it has to wage the battle of ideas in our local communities, to expose the real Tory agenda. But we must also show that there is an alternative.

For instance, a People's Budget would stimulate economic growth and reduce the growing inequality gap with measures to: H Invest in health, education, housing, public transport and the environment.

H Halt all PFI and privatisation schemes to hand over public services to big business.

H Boost state pension and benefit levels in real terms, restoring the link with the retail price index.

H Increase the national minimum wage and retain the Agricultural Wages Board.

H Extend statutory equal pay audits into the private sector.

H Freeze gas, electricity and water prices and prepare to take all the utilities back into public ownership.

H Nationalise the banks and direct funds into manufacturing, small businesses, cooperatives and housing.

H Take the railways back into public ownership and subsidise fares and investment not shareholder dividends.

H Launch a massive public sector housebuilding programme. continued overleaf

There is an alternative This book challenges the consensus that has confined political economy to the options that the banks and big business will accept.

Based on the policy agenda that Britain’s trade union and labour movement have begun to shape it analyses what is wrong with the British economy, arguing that the country’s productive base is too small, that the economy has become too financialised and that power has become concentrated on a narrow economic fraction based in the City.

It sets out policies to establish democratic and social control of the City, arguing that regulation is not enough.The book focuses on how immediate growth and longer-term reindustrialisation might be achieved, arguing that a socially owned banking sector can foster the creation of a new, sustainable, social housing sector, a new communications infrastructure and new green industries.

The book argues for an alternative economic strategy that breaks political dependence on the US, and diversifies economic relationships, fostering those with emerging BRICS economies and questioning anew our dependence on the European Union, whose ‘social model’ now seems a distant memory.

Critically the book tackles the problems that a progressive government would face and argues that an alternative economic strategy must be accompanied by measures to devolve political power and encourage the active participation of the people in exercising control over big business and finance.

It insists on the importance of a strategy to boost spending power for the British people, begin to narrow the widening inequalities in British society and raise the standard of living and build a new, democratised public realm that insulates people from dependence on volatile financial markets.

Edited by Jonathan White with contributors from Mark Baimbridge, Brian Burkitt, Mary Davis, John Foster Marjorie Mayo, Jonathan Michie, Seumas Milne, Andrew Murray, Roger Seifert, Prem Sikka, Jonathan White and Philip Whyman.

Building an economy for the people an alternative economic and political strategy for 21st century Britain £6.95 (+£1 p&p) ISBN 978-1-907464-08-9 www.manifestopress.org.uk

continued

Where would the money come from?

Britain is still the world's sixth biggest economy. The wealthiest one-tenth of the population own at £4,500bn in personal wealth, 44 per cent of the total (whereas half the population own just 10 per cent). That's without taking into account at least £3,000bn in hidden assets.

Since 2011, the Bank of England has pumped an extra £175bn into the banks and financial institutions in 'quantitative easing' (QE). Most of this has been used to improve corporate bank balances and speculate in the financial markets.

A People's Budget would therefore: H Introduce a 2 per cent Wealth Tax on the super-rich, raising £90 billion a year – almost twice this year's public spending cuts.

H Reverse the recent cuts in corporation tax for the biggest companies.

H Restore the top rate of income tax (at 60 per cent not 50).

H Slap a windfall tax on energy, retail and banking monopoly profits.

H Impose a financial transaction tax on the City bankers and speculators.

H Divert Bank of England funds from QE and the impotent Funding for Lending Scheme into infrastructure bonds issued by local, devolved and other public authorities.

H End the tax haven status of all territories under British jurisdiction.

Many of these policies arise from the positions taken in the People's Charter, endorsed by the TUC, the Scottish TUC, Wales TUC and many individual unions.

The People's Assembly Against Austerity on June 22 provides a great opportunity for the labour and people's movement to go on the offensive for policies to benefit the millions, not the millionaires.

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