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Make the rich pay

We as trade unionists must be the voice of the disenfranchised and we must now stand together and demand more from our elected representatives, writes NEU rep ROBERT POOLE

I FEEL like I’m stuck in an endless loop. Groundhog day on steroids. It’s deja vu all over again. What year is this? 2010? Yes everyone, they’re freezing our pay again. Or should I say cutting pay because in real terms we all know that’s what it is.

The government has decided, in its infinite wisdom, that what the economy really needs right now is for people to have less money. Not all people of course, don’t get me wrong. If you’re a mate or a minister or the daughter of a donor then you’re probably sitting pretty on a large contract to deliver PPE.

Alas, the time for clapping key workers is over and it’s back to shafting them. In the recent spending review Rishi Sunak — the billionaire banker turned MP, the man who is richer than the Queen — announced that public-sector workers, police officers, firefighters and teachers will receive a pay freeze.

The same old lines about public debt being paid off by future generations were wheeled out of course in an attempt to justify this new bout of austerity but make no mistake, this is all to do with ideology and nothing to do with economics. Even my Year 8 geography class can explain to you the concept of the multiplier effect. Simply put, if you pay public-sector workers more then they will go out and spend it in the economy. Think of it as “trickle up” economics.

This pay cut has been posited as being in some way “fair” as it puts public-sector workers in the same boat as private-sector workers. This is a cynical ploy and we’ve heard it all before. It’s a way of dividing public-sector workers from private workers. We’ll hear talk soon of “gold plated pensions” and levelling the playing field, they never said it meant levelling up I suppose.

For the government to freeze pay at this time feels particularly insulting as educational professionals are putting their health on the line daily. Classes of 30 or more with no PPE are the norm. Track and trace is a failure and asymptomatic children make the job of school leaders to isolate those with Covid-19 impossible despite their best efforts.

I’ve tried to find up to date data on the number of education workers who have contracted Covid-19, been seriously ill or even died but there doesn’t seem to be much available. The National Education Union too has written to the DfE rightly asking for this to be shared with them.

They have stated that “As part of your duty of care to education staff, we are confident that you are collecting data about the risks they face and therefore we would urge you to share with us, for each week since September:

1. The number of teachers and support staff who have tested positive

2. The number of teachers and support staff who have been hospitalised

3. The number of teachers and support staff who have died. 

The government’s seeming reluctance to publish this data is a cause for concern in itself.

Once again the government is being short sighted. Although the crisis will probably see a number of people joining the profession, seeing teaching as a safe option in the face of economic uncertainty, retention of staff is still a major problem. Recruitment is nothing without retention.

We are a profession plagued by heavy workloads, alienation and over surveillance. Add to that pay freezes, Ofsted and underfunding and it is surprising that we manage to keep the staff we have. The European Commission found that teachers in England scored the lowest in Europe for job satisfaction.

The OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey in 2018 found that England ranks 46th out of 48 countries for our levels of professional autonomy and that only 29 per cent of teachers felt that their job was valued in society. Of course a pay rise won’t solve all of these problems, there is a lot of work to do there, but it might go some way towards reassuring education workers that they are valued.

It could be of course that the government wants a revolving door of teachers. New graduates enter the profession, do a couple of years and then leave before they manage to unionise. You are less likely to make demands of your employer if you know that you have no intention of staying.

This of course doesn’t just affect those working in education. Once again the working class are being forced to pay for a crisis not of their making. We saw this in the 2008 global financial crisis and in every crisis of capitalism before that. While companies like Amazon have made superprofits from this crisis the wages of working people are effectively cut.

We need to be a united voice now demanding that the government put in place a windfall tax on profiteering companies. We as trade unionists must be the voice of the disenfranchised and we must now stand together and demand more from our elected representatives. It’s time that for once we make the rich pay for this crisis.

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