The National Education Union are currently balloting teachers and support staff for strike action. So far, the signs are positive for the union (they achieved a 62% turnout on their indicative ballot) and it looks as though they will be able to mount industrial action in January. However, as a union, the NEU can only nationally negotiate on pay on behalf of teachers. It cannot do so with its approximately 40,000 support staff members in schools across the country. This scenario is far from novel in the wider trade union movement. But this is chiefly a story of the restrictive nature of anti-trade union legislation fostering a structurally weak trade union movement, which encourages unions to compete with each other for a limited pool of members.
In the state sector, school support staff are employed by local authorities and not the school they work in. The majority of these local authorities (there are some exceptions such as Kent and Surrey, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire) are bound by National Joint Council (NJC) negotiations on pay. The result of this is that support staff pay is placed on the same scale as other local authority workers. This is a structural problem, one the last Labour government was hoping to fix by creating a national pay body for support staff in the NJC. As the NJC negotiates the pay rise for teaching assistants, who have more than trebled in number since 2000, this particular pay rise will come out of already stretched school budgets. This lack of a separate pay body is what creates difficulty for the NEU in representing support staff.
The three unions with recognition on the NJC are Unite, UNISON, and GMB – not the NEU. Currently, these unions are not balloting for strike action as the 2022/23 pay round offer given to NJC staff was a lump sum of £1,925 which represented a significant award as a percentage (though still below the current rate of inflation) for staff on lower NJC pay points. However, it is understood that the NJC unions are not ruling out balloting support staff, depending on what happens in the Autumn Statement. While the NEU can represent its support staff on an individual basis in workplace processes (as could any other union), its absence on the NJC severely limits what it can do for them collectively. The NEU is in a position where it will be encouraging many of its members to vote in a dispute where the union will not actually be able to negotiate on their behalf.
Historically, the NEU is open to support staff members as, prior to the 2017 merger of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers & the National Union of Teachers, the ATL had members who were teaching assistants. However, this does not answer the question of why the union is recruiting members that it cannot negotiate on behalf of nationally. One reason might be that the union sees this as a recruitment opportunity. Industrial action at times of crisis is often a good recruiter and currently there is no national ballot of support staff members being conducted by any of the three NJC unions in England.
Many unions adopt a view of the more members the better, as this means more immediate finances and, so the logic goes, puts the union in a position to grow at a greater rate. Another reason could be around the practicalities of industrial action; if teachers strike but support staff do not, then schools could be kept open by the support staff. Even though this would dent the education received by the children, it still means that parents can drop their children at school and not have to worry about finding alternative childcare during industrial action, denting the effectiveness of such action.
While the NEU could argue that only by recruiting more support staff will it then be in a position to secure national recognition for collective bargaining on their behalf, the only way this would appear viable would be for the NEU to secure NJC recognition, which would then put it in the position of also negotiating for other local authority workers. This would have the knock on effect of diluting the union, as their focus would move away from teachers. Another issue may arise due to the fact the union does not have institutional knowledge of other NJC workers’ employment conditions.
Regardless of the reasons, the NEU’s approach brings it into conflict with the three NJC unions and it is understood that UNISON are in the process of reporting the NEU to the Trade Union Congress’ dispute panel. Furthermore, recruiting support staff can create what is effectively a two-tiered membership. Support staff membership fees could fund national campaigns for teachers’ pay as teachers are the dominant part of the membership and activist base, so could receive more attention from the union. Indeed, one GMB officer who has responsibility for organising NJC staff contends that most of the time when GMB are providing individual support to a support staff member, it is a teacher on the other side of the conflict. Support staff are also on worse terms and conditions than teachers, with many support staff working on term-time only contracts. Support staff are covered by the NJC Green book and teachers are governed by the Burgundy Book. Thus, they are on completely different terms and conditions.
In this sense, the situation is not too dissimilar from the Royal College of Nursing recruiting Health Care Assistants (who are also recruitment targets for UNISON in particular) even when nurses dominate the union and are at least three pay bands higher on the NHS’ Agenda for Change pay scale. Though, unlike the NEU, the RCN can at least negotiate over HCA pay nationally. The fact that more than one union acts in this way highlights one of the structural weaknesses in the British trade union movement, namely that the nature of work and a limited pool of members means that unions will often be driven to compete with each other for members.
This is currently happening between RMT and Prospect at Ormsted. Unions exploiting a situation if it advances their interests and the interests of their members is not uncommon (as GMB did with IWGB’s court case against Deliveroo). The NEU’s recruitment of Teaching Assistants demonstrates the benefit of clear boundaries between unions when it comes to recruiting members. One GMB officer reflected that they used to have an easier relationship with the NUT as this was a craft union and the bargaining was done on a sectional basis. Conflict between unions is not uncommon and becomes inevitable in the wider context of a trade union movement restricted by anti-union legislation, which has seen public sector membership fall for the first time after four years of modest increases. However, that alone does not answer the question of why the NEU has recruited members it cannot negotiate on behalf of – on poor terms and conditions – to strike and forgo wages solely for the benefit of better paid and more securely employed workers that it can actually negotiate on behalf of.
The NEU was contacted for comment.