Education unions

National Union of Teachers (NUT), Association of University Teachers (AUT), National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) and other education unions

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Lecturers vote again for Israel boycott

The lecturers' union UCU voted on Wednesday 30 May in favour of boycotting Israel. An amendment moved by Workers' Liberty member Mark Osborn, to delete the boycott call from a motion on Israel/Palestine, was defeated, and the motion was passed. The motion was carried by 159 votes to 99 with 17 abstentions. The vote on the amendment was not counted, but was similar. The motion's wording is slippery, calling only for circulation of Palestinian calls for a boycott and "members to consider the moral implications of links with Israeli academic institutions", but the drift is clear. UCU was formed...

Hands off Heartsease High!

A hundred people attended Heartsease High School in Norwich to launch a campaign against proposals to turn the school into Norwich’s first City Academy. The meeting was chaired by local Labour MP Ian Gibson, who has come out firmly against the Academy. The Division Secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the region’s NUT Executive member were there, along with local teachers, parents (and some students), councillors and governors. Two members of the Anti-Academies Alliance spoke about the chaos caused by the switch from being a community school to becoming an Academy. The meeting...

UCU conference

UCU, the lecturers’ union, formed from the merger of Natfhe and AUT, meets in conference for the first time at the end of May. The SWP have a softish motion for a boycott of Israel on the agenda (through Brighton University and UEL). The motion includes the following stupidity, “Congress believes that in these circumstances [of Israeli occupation] passivity or neutrality is unacceptable and criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-semitic.” Such a statement – that no criticism of Israel is anti-semitic – is no casual, sloppy mistake. The last Natfhe conference, in 2006, passed a similar...

United action to beat public-sector pay cut - Who will move first?

By Pat Murphy All the main public-sector unions have now taken some sort of position in favour of united industrial action to force pay rises at least matching inflation and to break the two per cent limit decreed by Gordon Brown for both 2007-8 and 2008-9. The question now is, who will take the initiative to turn this talk into action? In June 2006 Gordon Brown promised that he would peg increases in the public sector pay bill to 2% over the next two years. This is a year-on-year promise to cut real pay for millions of workers. With inflation currently running at nearly 5%, two per cent means...

1000 against English course cuts

Over 1000 people demonstrated in Hackney in opposition to proposed cuts in English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) courses on April 27th, with marches from Islington, Tower Hamlets and Hackney boroughs converging outside Hackney Town Hall. The government last year cut funding for adult education courses by 3%, with the effect that ESOL courses for over-19s will no longer be free. This despite the fact that they are withdrawing benefit rights for those immigrants who do not speak English. The Education Minister Bill Rammell has commented that the current funding set up is “unsustainable”...

Fight ARU cuts

From Cambridge Education Not for Sale 80 students and trade unionists demonstrated outside Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge on May Day in protest at the course and job cuts being proposed by ARU management. Five courses, including politics, modern language, law and 20th century history are being threatened with closure or cut backs, and ARU UCU says that this will mean the loss of 90 teaching jobs. The protesters, who as well as lecturers included other trade unionists and students from ARU, Cambridge university and a number of schools and FE colleges, heard speeches from representatives...

Unions to unite for strikes against pay cuts

By Tom Unterrainer Unions of teachers, health workers, and civil service workers are all moving towards strikes to challenge Gordon Brown’s decree for pay cuts in the public sector. On 17 April, the conference of the Royal College of Nursing voted by 95% to take nationwide industrial action for the first time since the RCN was set up in 1916. The GMB union reported that its members in the health service had voted 74% to support strike action over pay, and 91% to support industrial action short of strikes. At the conference of the National Union of Teachers, over the Easter weekend, the union...

NUT conference

By a delegate The big step forward at the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers, in Harrogate at Easter, was the passing of a motion calling for united public-sector strike action on pay. Chances to push the union leadership into action on other issues were, however, missed. Performance related pay will be introduced in September. Conference had a motion calling for a ballot for “a programme of national strike action” against it. The Executive proposed to amend the motion so that it called on them only to consider national action, and only if additional PRP measures were...

Strike threat wins

By Jean Lane, Tower Hamlets Unison Support Staff at Central Foundation Girls’ School in East London won a dispute over redundancies just before the Easter holidays began. Last September the new Headteacher announced an intention to restructure the admin department and that this would be likely to lead to redundancies. Eleven admin workers were to lose their job and be made to reapply for another. Unison members asked the head for redundancy-avoiding measures such as direct assimilation. We were told no even before the new job descriptions had been written, on the basis of an excuse about job...

NUT Conference - The Case for Solidarity

From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007 For many years the ‘International Section’ of conference has been dominated by motions and amendments offering various interpretations of the world situation. Most of these have focussed exclusively on the crimes of Western imperialism or the actions of Israel alone. Little to no comment has been offered on the brutality of regimes such as Iran or movements like Hamas and Hezbollah. Oppression is not a one-way street. Murders are not the sole prerogative of US or Israeli guns and bombs. The world is not divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’...

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