NUT General Secretary election: Vote Martin Powell-Davies!

Submitted by AWL on 10 June, 2014 - 1:51

Voting in the National Union of Teachers (NUT) General Secretary election is taking place between 4 and 25 June. There are two candidates — the incumbent, Christine Blower, and Martin Powell-Davies, a member of the Socialist Party and the candidate of the Local Associations National Action Campaign (LANAC), a rank-and-file network within the NUT.

Workers' Liberty is supporting Martin Powell-Davies. When the Deputy General Secretary election takes place later this year LANAC will be standing Patrick Murphy, a Workers' Liberty member.

The GS election is a straight choice between the current NUT leadership, which has led the union through a campaign of isolated, one-day strikes, constantly prevaricating and delaying while teachers in schools are driven further into the ground by excessive workload and the drive for exam and league table performance, and one of the activists who has consistently argued for a strategy to win. Martin Powell-Davies does not only stand for an effective industrial dispute that sets out to defeat the education secretary, and intends to win, he argues that this can only be achieved by reinvigorating the union from the base up.

Martin argues for “a strong union in every workplace”: with the diminishing role of local authorities, individual schools are increasingly becoming the employer. On that basis we should also organise with colleagues in other unions, including the other major teachers' union NASUWT, on a school, local, and national level. However, too often the unwillingness of NASUWT to participate in national strikes has been used as an excuse to postpone NUT's own action. Martin cuts across this by arguing for unity of teacher trade unionists in the workplace, to put pressure on both our leaderships.

Martin also promises that if elected he will be a teachers' representative on a teachers' wage. Workers' Liberty has long argued that elected union officials should be on a workers' wage, and should not receive pay increases until they win them for their members. Where members run the union and union officials and bureaucrats are accountable to them.

Until ballot papers arrived this week, NUT members would be forgiven for not knowing there was an election happening. There was no hustings at the 2014 AGM over East weekend, there has been no coverage in The Teacher, the union’s magazine, and no local hustings have happened with both candidates. This is shameful behaviour on the part of the current leadership of the NUT.

Teachers have an opportunity to elect an activist leader, on a classroom teachers' salary who has consistently argued for a serious strategy to win our dispute. Vote Martin Powell-Davies number 1 for General Secretary.

To find out more about Martin's campaign, click here.

Please consider getting your association to nominate Patrick Murphy for Deputy General Secretary. More details here.

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