The NUT and other union campaigns around pay raise a slogan for ‘Fair Pay’. What does this actually mean? For the unions it means a pay increase in proportion to the Retail Price Index (RPI) – a broad measure of the rate of increase in prices that factors in housing as well as consumer goods. So at the very least, ‘fair pay’ means an increase that would prevent an effective cut in wages. For example, if pay is increased by 2% when RPI stands at 5% it means a teacher earning £25,000 will be £750 worse off per year in real terms. So the fight for ‘fair pay’ by this measure is obviously important. ‘Fair pay’ would mean a 5% increase.

But let’s take a broader view of ‘pay’ and see if teachers and other education workers are really getting a ‘fair’ deal. Under capitalism, the basic measure of the quantity of work done by any one individual is measured by time: seconds, minutes, hours, days ... whatever. On average, we are expected to complete a certain amount of work in a certain unit of time. Teachers are expected to work 1265 hours per year. This is the amount of time the government (a) thinks we need to finish all our work (b) is prepared to pay us for. So a teacher on £25000 gets paid about £19 per hour. Recent surveys of teacher working hours show that we actually work an average of 1915 hours per year. So ‘fair pay’ for our teacher on £25000 would actually be £36383!

But there is more to work than the number of hours you spend in school, marking books or preparing. Teaching assistants in particular have experienced an ‘intensification’ of their work. Many TAs are expected to work with larger groups of students, carry out tasks like marking and preparation etc... Without a related increase in pay this means TAs are doing more work for the same money. This ‘intensification’ with no reward is in effect a pay cut.

There is more to the slogan ‘Fair Pay’ than meets the eye. That’s why introducing issues like workload into future action and formulating a strategy that places demands on working time and the tasks we carry out is so important to this dispute.