Morning Star Monday January 8 2018
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on vice-president Ben Chacko teachers are providing breakfast club. “We’ve brought in lunch, we’ve identified kids who need more than just the dinner they’re getting. “One of the most heartbreaking stories is from a secondary school in Portsmouth, a girl who literally has nothing. An amazing student. “They timetabled her PE so she has double PE on a Wednesday, during which her school uniform is washed, dried and stuck back on her peg so she can feel a pride in her learning — because that poverty is showing and that will affect her chances and how she feels about herself. “I’m part of the Girls Network, which is a team of women which started in Portsmouth and London and has been rolled out to Liverpool and Newcastle. “It’s entirely voluntary — you apply to be a mentor and are assigned a girl between 14 and 19. You meet them and have conversations, sometimes in
FEATURES 9 school, sometimes outside — you talk about what they want to do with their life, with girls from very deprived backgrounds who don’t maybe have access to many opportunities or much advice, or perhaps role models. “But it’s sad there’s a need for this because really this support should be available in schools, for example in PSHE” (personal, social and health education). “Tutor time shouldn’t be checking you’ve got all the homework in, it should mean time with the kids to talk about what they want.” That time is denied teachers forced to drill children for constant examinations, with a relentless focus on maths and English that has also narrowed their learning. And the tremendous time pressures are one reason schools find it so hard to retain teachers. Government figures show that almost a third of the teachers recruited in 2010, for example, had left the profession five years later. “It’s not a job for life any more — the workload is massive, huge,” says Martin. “But if the workload was big but in the end you felt you were doing the best by the kids teachers would still do it. “My passion is teaching, and my passion is also the trade union movement. Why would you give your time to the movement if you’re only going to stay five years?” Martin does not have a trade union background. Her father was a policeman. Her mother worked in a factory but stayed at home after having children. Only her grandfather, a train driver, championed trade unions and talked politics with her. He also gave her a copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. “That’s the society we’re going back to. It’s a horrible, awful book, but you need to feel cross — life was like that.” That’s where Martin’s socialism comes in. “I was sat on a panel looking at dyslexia the other day and mentioned that things have actually got worse for dyslexic kids, and one of the parents said: ‘Why do you have to make education political?’ “I said I’d love not to have to. I’d love a country where the schools system doesn’t change on a politician’s whim.” It was her understanding that political change was needed that helped bring her into the trade union movement — and she credits the late Steve Sinnett above all others with inspiring her to take a leading role and get others involved. Martin is a member of the Labour Party, but she’s aware the NEU contains members who will not be and some who are members of other parties — even the Conservatives. The union is not a Labour affiliate. “That’s not a question that’s going to go quietly away,” Martin observes. “But in or out, we need to be able to scrutinise policy and politicians.” Teachers, she believes, should have far greater input into educational policy — with the country needing “a discussion around what education is, what’s it for.” The new union provides a platform for leading the discussion. “We can help combat apathy in the trade union movement. “Education unions have bucked the trend, we are different, doing things differently. “Now we have bigger numbers and people are going ‘wow,’ we’re deemed a ‘super-union.’ We need to make sure we retain that label — and not just because we’re the biggest. But because we’re the best.”
FULL MARX
CORE CONCEPTS EXPLAINED
Which is more important: class struggle or class prejudice? The Marx Memorial Library looks at the distinctions between social and economic definitions of class
A
STUDY last year by London University academics highlighted the shocking disparities in pay between individuals from different backgrounds. Most other papers treated this as minor news or ignored it altogether. The Morning Star rightly put it on the front page under the headline Working Class? That’ll be Six Grand off your Salary (and it was the only paper to mention TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady’s call for worker representation on company boards). The working class constitutes all those who have to sell their labour power by hand and brain in order to subsist and who don’t exploit the labour of others. The study found that people from working-class backgrounds who get a professional job are paid an average of £6,800 (17 per cent) less each year than colleagues from more affluent backgrounds. Even when they have the same educational attainment, role and experience, as their more privileged colleagues, those from poorer backgrounds are still paid an average of £2,242 (7 per cent) less. Women and ethnic minorities face an additional earnings disadvantage. But it’s important to distinguish between the sociologist’s “social class” from economic class. They are often confused. Social class is a hierarchical division of individuals (at its crudest, “upper,” “middle” and “lower” class) according to their income, occupation, lifestyle, or tastes. That sociological division is the one usually taught in schools and universities and assumed in
Pic: Reflected Serendipity/cc
the media, for whom the term “working class” is reserved mainly for those who work by manual labour — making or handling things in factories and shops or who correspond to the stereotypes presented in television in programmes such as Benefits Street. Prejudice then justifies widening social inequality. This approach is subjective and confused. For example the creative industries — music, art, theatre, etc — are usually excluded. Economic class is something different. It refers to people’s relationship to capital and the means of production — how goods and services are produced, what happens to their value, and who controls and profits from the process. It’s a relationship to power that people experience, not a label to be attached to individuals. Economic class is fundamental to society and to how power functions. The data reported by the Star used a sociological definition of class based on data from over 60,000 individuals classified by the job of their main earning parent (80 per cent of them fathers) using the government’s seven main occupational groupings. Managerial and professional jobs refer to classes one (company directors, doctors, lawyers, etc) and two (teachers, nurses, journalists). Classes six and seven refer to “semi-routine” (care workers, receptionists) and “routine” occupations (bar staff, cleaners, bus and lorry drivers, labourers). In between, classes three to five include police officers, secretaries, shopkeepers and small employers, electricians, train drivers and chefs. Britain has been described as a “class-ridden society,” far more socially stratified than most other European states. It was satirised by a famous sketch from the 1960s starring John Cleese, Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett as upper, middle and lower class. Upper-class Cleese looks down on Barker and Corbett. Middle-class Barker looks up to Cleese but down to Corbett. Working-class Corbett, looking up to Barker and Cleese, says merely: “I get a pain in my neck.” Social class can be a source of prejudice and discrimination. The study reported in the Star used the term working class for those whose parents’ jobs were routine or semi-routine. It uses the term middle class
just once (without defining it) to refer to the subtle processes of favouritism or cultural-matching, whereby elite employers misrecognise social and cultural traits they are familiar with as signals of merit and talent. Opposing this prejudice is important. The report (funded by the government’s Social Mobility Commission) begins by quoting Theresa May’s pledge in her maiden speech as Prime Minister: “We won’t entrench the advantages of the fortunate few, we will do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.” Most of us would say “if only” to that. However, while confronting class prejudice is important, it doesn’t of itself pose any threat to exploitation. On its own it does not challenge core power relationships within capitalism. Indeed, the lip-service paid by neoliberal politicians like May to improving social mobility reflects their desire to enhance “efficiency” (and labour competition) in key market sectors. And the “sociological” approach to class — the way it is presented in the media and popularly used — is often divisive, implying that middle-class teachers (for example) do not have a common interest with other workers in building a better world. They do. From an economic perspective, the working class constitutes all those who have to sell their labour power by hand and brain (the two cannot be separated) in order to subsist and who don’t exploit the labour of others. There are grey areas of course. Wayne Rooney’s salary at Manchester United topped £15 million a year — around £300,000 per week — though it’s reportedly gone down a bit since joining Everton. He’d probably be labelled “working class” by a sociologist but with an £82m fortune he arguably doesn’t have to sell his labour any more. And, as pointed out in earlier answers, while the boards and remuneration committees of Britain’s top companies claim that their CEOs (who each receive an average of £5.5m a year, some 130 times more than their employees) “earn” their pay, their work is focused not on producing use-value but on maximising profit and is directly exploitative of their workers. Social progress requires challenging all prejudice, discrimination and favouritism based on social class, gender, ethnicity or identity, wherever it exists. That is right in itself. It is also an essential part of enabling people to develop an awareness of their own economic class position — whatever their occupation and whether they are in full or part-time work, self-employed, carers or unemployed — and of the need for collective action. n The Marx Memorial Library’s Full Marx column appears every other Monday in the Morning Star.