Building a Revolutionary Union for Education Workers | June 2007

Solidarity Federation - International Workers' Association

Building a Revolutionary Union for Education Workers
An introduction to the Education Workers Network

Education Workers Network SolFed-IWA, June 2007

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An introduction to the Education Workers Network
Education, Education, Education
IT worker's view
Cleaner's view
Admin worker's view
Academic's view
Library worker's view
Porter's view
What is the Education Workers Network (EWN)?
Libertarian Education
Contact details/further info

An introduction to the Education Workers Network

Education workers have had enough, both of attacks on our terms and conditions of employment and on the quality of the education and educational experience that students and pupils are given. We have had enough of temporary contracts, employment agencies, privatisation, redundancies, increasing workloads, government interference, and arrogant, bullying management and personnel tactics aimed at isolating individual workers, and ignoring and undermining our elected union representatives. We are also sick of unions that cannot unite all education workers; that are too often unable or unwilling to respond to management manoeuvres; and that seem more interested in channelling members' anger away from collective action into individualistic solutions.

Education, Education, Education

After ten years of a government that professed education as a top priority, the problems that education workers of all categories and all roles face are huge. If it's not under-funding, poor resources or violence in the classroom, it's heavy-handed management, mountains of paperwork and constant testing of pupils and students. The morale of education workers in general is at rock bottom.

The UK education system groans under the weight of government policies. While funding is slashed, school teachers suffer increasing bureaucracy and stress and the universities are increasingly geared towards turning a profit, fee-paying and the passing of exams by increasing numbers of students. Schools are becoming semi-privatised, with big business and religious organisations handed control of finance and curriculum via "academy"status. College employees are demoralised by low pay and failure to implement national pay agreements, bad management, increasing workloads, cuts in adult education and an overly-vocational emphasis/government policy to turn FE Colleges into a form of "tertiary modern" education.

That the education unions have proved themselves powerless to stop this process is no surprise. They have no alternative to education under capitalism. They are divided into petty factions which frustrate unity and coordinated action. They are linked to the very Labour Party that encourages management to attack our wages and conditions, and that reinforces the "production line" notion of education at all levels.

IT worker's view

"I am on a fixed term contract and just got offered my 7th extension, of two months. At our university practically all new staff start on temporary contracts, and temporary contracts are chained one after another for long periods of time. The end of fixed term contracts are treated as natural occurrences, as opposed to dismissals, as they should be. UCU's strategy is of course like any business union's: focusing on industrial tribunals, grievance procedures and negotiating with the management."

Cleaner's view

"A few years ago my employer got rid of 100 cleaning posts to cut management's budget. They cut cleaner numbers in halls of residence, and the remaining workers were expected to make up the shortfall in staff. Later, halls of residence were privatised and more cleaners took redundancy pay or were transferred to a new, private sector employer with ultimately even worse pay and conditions. Although we had a militant shop steward there was no backing from the union bureaucrats for strike action to save our jobs."

Admin worker's view

"Student administrative support has just been centralised to create a "one-stop student reception" to deal with all student enquiries in one location. Previously separate departments have been physically and organisationally re-located together (management is trying to get people to do work outside their job descriptions, without actually discussing it). The union hasn't been involved at all.

When the union does negotiate with management, it is always from a position of weakness, since direct action is very seldom employed, the membership is not involved in the union, and membership levels generally are low.

Recently the management of the university I work at spent millions on building renovations. Jobs are left unfilled and unadvertised for months at a time, but there's always money for management posts (regardless of how little they actually do)."

Academic's view

"The move to vocationalism in universities means constant pushes to develop new courses etc in line with "employers needs". Not only does this alter the nature of education to that of training and lead to a narrowing of what will be taught (ie more job related specifics and less generalist, overall interpretations), meaning much less chance to introduce radical ideas and more conformity to Blairite (or whoever the government is at the time and the ideology it represents) policy directed practice; it also means we are in more meetings to discuss all this and there is far more pressure to conform. The introduction of PDPs etc to support the above is a nightmare that I have so far refused to have anything to do with. But the pressure to conform is very great, "It's only this form or that", "the students only have to do this" and so on. But when you stand back and look at the differences from just a few years ago, forms, meetings and other shite (as well as costs to students) have proliferated faster than rabbits.

Teaching and prep seems to be something we do as a side issue, ie when we have a few minutes. Teaching suffers and with it the student experience of HE.

Then there are the idiotic schemes designed to make the vast army of new managers look important. We have an "internal market" in the use of rooms. This means that our department has to pay a "space manager" every time we use a classroom; it's like paying to use your own bog at home.

Because of management's constant need to justify their fat wage packets they have come up with mad schemes such as shifting people around. Some have been moved from one office to the one next door, or 2 doors away. Many of us know that the place is being run by idiots, a few recognise that the whole show is run by idiots for the benefit of thieves, but there is less chance to voice this. The whole show stinks, there is something to be said for the old liberal dons; at least they believed in questioning. Now it's fascist right from the top and it's killing us."

Library worker's view

"HERA and the National Framework Agreement seems horribly reminiscent of the Single Status Agreement in Local Government. There Unison included a clause in the latter which allowed local employers to, in effect, decide which bits of the existing national agreements they could disregard while legally telling workers they adhered to them all.

Unison want their national bargaining rights but they don't want the responsibility of actually doing something nationally about them, so they drop branches in it. This also has the advantage for them of avoiding conflict with Gordon Brown, whom Prentiss and all the others have backed for Labour leader for years, while he screwed public sector workers and robbed our pensions."

Porter's view

"Having come from a well organised workplace where strikes and the threat of strikes were the norm it took a bit of adjusting to union activity within a university. Union members were in the minority, union meetings only took place once a year, and workplace organisation was virtually non-existent. The whole place was run on paternalism with management's attitude to staff, especially towards manual grades, condescending.

While orders were always dressed up as requests it was always made clear in the nicest possible way that what management says goes. As a result management's "requests" were never challenged. Amongst the manual grades where I work this led to understaffing, made worse by staff being expected to cover for sickness and absence. The whole attitude was that staff should do what it takes to keep the job going for the benefit of the university as a whole. Amongst the clerical staff this translated into an ethos based on a spurious "professionalism", under which the needs of the university come first - to the extent that some staff often work extra hours without pay.

The Unison branch is dominated by the fulltime official and workplace organisation is non-existent. The whole culture is based on problems being taken to the branch secretary where they are dealt within a quasi legal framework. Broader negotiations are always carried out by either the fulltimer, branch secretary or assistant branch secretary, or all three, with very little accountability."

We can fight back together by organising in the Education Workers Network.

What is the Education Workers Network (EWN)?

The EWN is an anarcho-syndicalist union in-formation for workers in education.

Why an "anarcho-syndicalist" union?

Collective decision-making by workplace meetings open to all union members; not by paid officials, lay representatives, committees, or branch meetings outside the workplace
Decisions carried out by mandated, recallable delegates elected from the workplace by their fellow workers
Union open to all workers employed within education, regardless of job, sector or workplace (industrial, as opposed to trade, unionism).
Collective industrial action, rather than grievance procedures or discussions with management, is where our power lies, and is the way to win our demands
While fighting management for short term, "bread and butter" issues at work, we strive at the same time to help build a revolutionary opposition to capitalism and the state which ultimately destroys both, and ushers in workers control of industry and a stateless, classless, free, libertarian communist (anarchist) society.

Why "in-formation"?

As a new initiative in this country, EWN is still relatively small (although interest and membership are growing all the time). For the time being, EWN members are probably best advised to remain as members of their respective trade unions (minimal protection at work being better than none at all), but as our perspective and the effectiveness of our methods draws increasing numbers of education workers into our ranks we will, in time, outgrow the need to remain members of the reformist business trade unions.

Currently we have more members who work in universities than in colleges or schools, but we hope in time to correct this - EWN is open to and welcomes interest from all workers in education, regardless of sector or job.

At this point we have to be realistic that we cannot act in exactly the same way as a fully-fledged union. At the same time however, we recognise that if we don't start somewhere we'll never create the type of education union that we need to turn the tide of events in favour of education workers, and of the working class generally.

What's special about education workers?

Nothing. Workers in all sectors of capitalist society are exploited and demoralised by wage slavery.

EWN is an industrial network of the Solidarity Federation, the British section of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers' Association (IWA), established in 1922. You join an industrial network of the Solidarity Federation by joining your nearest SolFed local. Although anarcho-syndicalism is not well known in this country, it does have historical echoes in the British syndicalist movement of the early 20th century. Many other European countries (and throughout the world) have strong IWA sections, and a history of anarcho-syndicalist organisation. SolFed aims for the establishment of anarcho-syndicalist unions in Britain across all sectors.

Libertarian Education

Since the late nineteenth century, libertarians have opposed the domination of religion in schools and universities, have favoured and campaigned for coeducation and for the freeing up of education from worthless examinations and rote-learning in order to allow for students and education workers free development. One example is the construction of the "Integral Education" movement of the Modern School conceived by Francesco Ferrer Guàrdia in Spain. The IWA, since its inception, has questioned the kind of education provided by state and religion and has sought to move towards a self-managed system of education.

The increased involvement of religions, corporations, and exam-obsessed ministries of education mean that it is high time for us in this country to question and seek alternatives to the establishment curriculum. EWN in Britain seeks to help move this agenda forward.