‘Urgency’ as NEU exec members told to get ready and start briefing branches now ready for vote in favour of action
The National Education Union (NEU) is preparing for strike action ‘with a real sense of urgency’ in response to the government’s input to the ‘School Teachers Review Body’ pay review, which is expected in just over a week.
A message sent by the union’s joint general secretaries to members of the NEU executive tells them to start getting branches ready to achieve a positive vote by union members in favour of action on a government offer that is not expected to be anywhere near the eight percent rise the union is demanding for hard-pressed teachers:
Dear colleagues,
Mary and I are writing to follow-up our discussion on the pay campaign at the last executive. There was a real sense of urgency in the discussion and agreement of an overall approach to the next stages, most especially building member engagement, Value Education, Value Educators style, from the bottom up.
Since the executive, we learnt that the DfE remit to the School Teachers Review Body (STRB) will be published before Christmas but not before 13 December. On that basis, we must prepare for a members’ pay survey to run in the New Year – provisionally to go live on 14 January.
We all need to take steps before then to prepare the ground. We need your help with explaining the strategy to our branch officers and stressing the importance of them organising reps’ briefings in early January.
Specifically, we are asking geographically elected executive members to:
Deliver a briefing of all branches in your area on pay and workload before the Xmas break.
Our toolkit with model resources is here. – branch officers contact details, template email and SMS invites and model briefing slides. N.B. Executive members in the same executive district will need to plan together about the best way to deliver this briefing.Encourage your branches to hold a briefing for all reps on pay and workload between 10-14 January.
Reps that attended a briefing are 48 per cent more likely to take workplace action which in turn boosts survey response rates. The briefing should take place the week before the pay survey goes live, i.e 10-14 January – and will following a national joint general secretary Zoom being scheduled for 4-7 January.
Sending the branch toolkit to your branches locally
After your briefing, send your local branches our toolkit and keep up-to-date with them to ensure briefings are scheduled and promoted to reps before the end of term.
Alongside this work, we will orgnaise a national Zoom for the first week of term and we will utilise our national union communications platforms to popularise our demand for an 8 per cent pay rise across all teacher pay scales in 2022 and 8 per cent in 2023. Watch and share this video explaining why such a pay rise is so vital to addressing our teacher recruitment and retention crisis.
We do not believe these Zoom calls with local officers need to wait until the STRB remit is published. We need to build member support for our 8 per cent claim now, preparing the ground with branches and reps so that we stimulate members to reject the STRB remit and declare themselves in favour of action.
We think that work starts now. Thanks in advance for all your support.
Yours sincerely,
Kevin and Mary
Skwawkbox view:
Like NHS staff, teachers have borne much of the brunt of the Tories’ reckless disregard for human life that has cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives and health during the pandemic – and they still face doing their jobs in environments where none of the recommended anti-transmission mitigations have been provided by the government, despite schools being the main driver of infection – a long-known fact that this week led Belgium to close schools as its sole lockdown measure in response to the new coronavirus variant and rising infections.
And like NHS staff and other front-line workers who have put their lives on the line, teachers are unlikely to receive anything like the reward and recognition they are entitled to expect – and tragically, there will be no demands from the Labour leadership for better, judging by Keir Starmer’s feeble response to the government’s derisory pay offers to the NHS and public sector workers.
Skwawkbox stands in solidarity with teachers and all workers facing exploitation by the Establishment.
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