Solidarity to the Durham teaching assistants as they start
today their first two day strike. This is in opposition to an attempt to
drive down pay using the excuse of “equal pay” to impose cuts on a predominantly
low paid female workforce.
The news
is that their action is effective.
Let’s hope they don’t need to take more action to sway
their pay-cutting employers, who shame the Labour Party – but if they do we can
all donate to the hardship
fund.
This dispute highlights the dilemma of single status in
local government, both from the point of view of how it has localised pay
negotiations (so that people doing similar jobs in different localities can end
up earning very different rates of pay) and from the point of view of the way
in which (the least threat of) equal pay litigation can turn out to have
unforeseen and sometimes unwelcome consequences.
The Durham dispute, with its longer-running sister in Derby
around the same issue demonstrates that a serious threat really requires a
simple response – resistance.
With the very real prospect of merger
between the National Union of Teachers and the Association of Teachers and
Lecturers (who organise teaching assistants although without national
recognition) and therefore of an “all grades” union emerging in schools, UNISON
and the other support staff unions will have to look to our laurels in
defending the interests of members in schools. Durham and Derby show the way perhaps?
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