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| buy your teacher Citizen Smith it will teach them how to strike |
If you want to cut to the chase and here me rant full on, just click on the RANT link, otherwise you can read the background to my peevish state of mind. Perhaps I woke up on the wrong side of bed this morning.
As a private sector worker, who has survived the recession with my job intact I find the main reason stated above for the strike baffling: I don't have an employer provided pension. If I want anything in excess of the state pension (if there is still one in 30 years time!), I have to fund that myself. I already lost out when Equitable Life went under, so that set me back a years worth of contributions before I'd even really started.
I'm a qualified chartered accountant working in practice with 10 years post qualification experience. My colleague's wife is head of year at a primary school. That's head of year, not head, not deputy head. She gets paid roughly what I do. In the summer she spends a month at the seaside with her kids and parents. I work in a non unionised profession that doesn't strike. A profession that has a history of long working hours. 50 hour weeks aren't unusual and there have been occasions where I've been at my desk at 2am, or for the majority of the weekend. I don't complain, it was my choice.
But it's not really the issue of the pensions that's got my goat up. Pensions are part of the overall package that teachers get:
- good (better than average) job security- how many headlines about mass redundancies in the teaching profession have you seen during the recession?
- reasonable working days- our local primary is dark and locked up when I leave for work and dark and locked up when I get home in the evening.
- an employer contributed pension- wow, in all the jobs I've had there's never been a sniff of one of these.
- long holidays- whilst teachers do obviously do lesson prep and admin during some of the school holidays, they still get massively more than most. Currently a quarter of my holiday is allocated to school things like daytime parent evenings (an oxymoron if ever there was one)!
- a fair salary. I'm not going to say it's a great or even good salary, teaching obviously has it's skills and it's challenges but in context it's not unreasonable in my opinion.
So what really gets my goat in a climate where we're all having to watch our backs with the spectre of unemployment continuing to hang over us, and our schools increasingly switching year inductions, parent evenings and everything else that has traditionally been held outside office hours, into the working day, the teachers are costing us another day of annual leave and apparently most of them can't even be bothered to attend marches or picket the school from what I've personally heard.
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| you apparently wont see many picket lines, particularly in St Albans |
In my book if you're going to strike, you should be on a protest march or standing by a burning brazier waving a placard and chanting slogans, a proper 1970's Citizen Smith style protest. You shouldn't be proudly telling people that you intend to spend the day at the cinema. Apparently when the Irish teachers went on strike a couple of years ago, there was a perceptible rise in shoppers crossing the border for a day trip (this is anecdotal, someone told me over twitter). That is not the way to get sympathy for your cause in my opinion!
I'm unconvinced that the need for strike action is so necessary but even taking that a moot point for now and ignoring my opinion on it, the way to gain sympathy for your cause is to do it properly. Not gad about like you've got an extra day of holiday. Yes, I know NUT aren't paying it's members a basic salary during the strike, so there is a real cost to the time off but the honourable intentions of the ideological few are being drowned out by the cavalier actions of the many.
As a full time working dad I understand that things can be difficult but the way forward isn't to punish the kids at school and their parents by heading off to the cinema to watch Transformers 3.
I'm unconvinced that the need for strike action is so necessary but even taking that a moot point for now and ignoring my opinion on it, the way to gain sympathy for your cause is to do it properly. Not gad about like you've got an extra day of holiday. Yes, I know NUT aren't paying it's members a basic salary during the strike, so there is a real cost to the time off but the honourable intentions of the ideological few are being drowned out by the cavalier actions of the many.
As a full time working dad I understand that things can be difficult but the way forward isn't to punish the kids at school and their parents by heading off to the cinema to watch Transformers 3.
I disagree, firstly I want to disregard what teachers get in terms of their overall package. We all choose whether to work in the private or public sector so agree by way of contract to our terms and conditions.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if you were suddenly told that you were not only having no pay increase for the next so many years, but that you were actually going to have to a) work 5 years longer than you'd been previously told and that b) actally you're taking a 3% hit on your salary, because the govt want to pay less into your pension, then you'd be pretty annoyed.
The government is making everyone (public & private sectors alike) pay for the mistakes that it and the banks made. That isn't fair, and although I doubt very much a few days of industrial action will change the coalitions mind about the pension reforms, they should have their right to shout about it.
My rant is actually about the teachers not shouting about it but sodding off to the cinema instead.
ReplyDeleteBy all means protest but look at the reality of the situation too. I sincerely doubt whether I'll get a state pension when I retire in 30 years time, despite a life time of national insurance contributions but that's the reality of it.
Talking to a colleague in the office in his 40's who is married to a teacher, the only people he feels sorry for as those that entered the profession in the 70's/80's when teachers were really poorly paid and the pension was a carrot to recruitment. Perhaps they need to do some sort of age related cut off on the pension cuts, because public sector pension issues aren't going to go away, the recession has only brought forward the issue IMHO.
Teachers pay and conditions baffled me when I became a governor. No other profession collectively bargains on a nationwide scale. Because it does, there is need for union involvement. This seems alien to people in other graduate professions.
ReplyDeleteI don't agree that, as you imply, teaching is a cushy number. For too long other professions have seen it as a soft option when their own sector has fallen on hard times. Fact of the matter is their is an alarming proportion leaving teaching every year, many only a few years after qualifying. There are gaps in certain specialisms. In that context we need make the profession attractive otherwise god knows who we'll have teaching our kids.
As for not being an activist on a picket line, that's unions for you. Some are more active than others.
Finally, one day won't damage our kids. They won't wake up stupid in the morning. Parents take their kids out of school for all sorts of reasons. Suddenly the teachers strike and its a scandal? Oh please...
I agree whole heartedly with your argument but also I don't think they have a reason to complain in the first place. In the Telegraph today is some statistics about teachers pensions. A mid ranking teacher earning £32k a year will receive a final salary pension equivalent to a £500k pension pot. That's 20 times higher than the average private sector scheme. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me to reduce this benefit.
ReplyDeleteI've had a pay freeze for the past 3 years and will get a pension equal to what I pay in. I too have no expectation of a state pension when I retire so my only option is to put at leat 5% of my salary away each month in the hope its enough to support my family. Teachers need to get real and realise that they can't expect these benefits without an increase in taxes or reduction in benefits elsewhere. Somehow we have to pay for these things and not just because the banks caused a recession.
I disagree that schools are always locked up and dark in the evenings. I went to a governor training session last night that 4 of the teaching staff also attended. And just because the other teachers weren't there doesn't mean they are not working - most take work home, I am pretty sure of that. After all, most of them have young families too.
ReplyDeleteAs a new governor, I respect the right of the teachers to strike. Not everyone will do - because they don't believe in striking - but I guess they need to make their point. I certainly won't be taking it out on the individuals who have chosen to strike. One of them is my own son's class teacher and to be honest, if her son is off school, I wouldn't begrudge her a trip to the cinema. It's not like she's being paid for today. And as HUN says, the flimsy reasons some parents give for taking their kids out of school amaze me sometimes (and I am not against families taking termtime holidays). One day is not going to make a difference tho we are making sure my son does some reading and stuff.
A word about meetings - that must be a trend in your school as our parents evenings run 4-7pm and other meetings tend to be at 6pm. If you don't like them, make it clear to the school via parent surveys or by raising it with the HT. It seems wrong that a quarter of your leave is taken that way.
Just because employees in the private sector get shat on from a great hight doesn't mean the government should drop their trousers and shit on the public sector too.
ReplyDeletePrivate sector employers should aspire to treat their employees as well as public sector workers, not public sector aspire to treat their employees as crapply as private sector.
And ultimately, people knew what they were getting into when they took their jobs. You don't go and stand in a bucket of shit and then start complaining when other people have clean feet.
Lots of shit metaphors there.
But on the other point, I agree - if you are striking you should stand with a placard in your hands.
Kate- that was really a specific comment about our primary school, the same one which is now running day time parents evenings so teachers don't have to work evenings. That's 60 parents potentially put out as opposed to one teacher...
ReplyDeleteDan- I've heard the don't drag everyone down to the lowest level argument from the trade union leaders today. The same trade union leaders who have been criticised by Ed Milliband for striking whilst negotiations are still under way.
ReplyDeleteWhilst I have some sympathy, private sector final salary schemes mostly bit the dust ten years ago, it shows the bureaucracy of government that its taken them this long to catch up.
Ultimately the people being shat on are teachers close to retirement and I think on reflection the changes should be phased in so they don't affect older teachers.
As an anti strike teacher said on R5 earlier, there are actually waiting lists at the majority of teacher training colleges that in some instances span two or more years, so those coming into the profession should be able to cope.