DR Mary Bousted, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), made a last minute plea to the Tories on Sunday for the resumption of pay talks to avert the strike by teachers across England on Thursday over a pay demand for a 15% increase.
This drew an immediate response from the Tories with a Department for Education source telling the Telegraph newspaper ‘Our position has not changed on industrial action’.
The position of the Tories is that their Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, has consistently refused to meet the NEU unless it agreed to call off its planned strikes due to take place on Thursday, followed by a further one-day strike on May 2nd.
Earlier this month, members of three education unions – NEU, NAHT and ASCL – voted overwhelmingly to reject the Tory offer of a 4.5% increase and a one-off payment of £1,000.
The bulk of this increase is to be paid out of the budgets of schools already struggling to survive after years of cuts imposed by the Tories.
Following this vote, the Tories withdrew the £1,000 payment and are insisting teachers accept having 4.5% imposed on them.
This refusal to meet with the education unions unless they cave-in and completely surrender the right of the members to withdraw their labour is not surprising. The same treatment has been handed out to junior doctors and nurses.
The British Medical Association (BMA) resorted to appealing to the Tories to ‘come round the table’ and enter into negotiations over pay for junior doctors, only to be arrogantly rebuffed and told they must call off strikes and drop their demand for a 35% increase before the Tories will even consider talks with them.
Along with the arrogant refusal to negotiate anything unless unions abandon the right to strike, the Tories have continually been exploring existing anti-union laws to declare strikes by teachers and nurses unlawful.
In the case of the NEU, Keegan bombarded the union with demands for information on balloting procedures and timescales for notifying employers of industrial action in an unsuccessful attempt to declare the ballot invalid.
Last Friday, Health Secretary Stephen Barclay announced that the Tories are taking out a case in the High Court to declare the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) strike from 30th April to 2nd May unlawful.
The Tories are acting on a claim by NHS Employers that the RCN strike ballot that closed midday on 2nd November 2022 means that any strike on 2nd May would be just outside the 6-month period and thus not covered by the strike mandate.
This makes the entire 48-hour strike illegal.
Barclay claimed at the weekend that any nurse going on strike would be in breach of the nursing code of conduct and could be struck off the nursing register and unable to continue working – sacked in other words.
RCN leader Pat Cullen responded to the ‘blatant threat’ asking ‘how low can this government stoop?’
Tellingly, Cullen added: ‘If the court finds against us, then we will absolutely work within the parameters of the law. We will never do anything illegal.’
The ‘Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill’, soon to come before Parliament before passing into law, gives the Tories and employers the absolute legal right to force workers to work and be sacked if they don’t comply.
This will put before the leaders of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and trade unions the issue of whether they are prepared to break the Tory laws designed to make strikes illegal and destroy independent trade unions, turning them into Labour Fronts.
Last month, Fire Brigades Union (FBU) general secretary Matt Wrack demanded that the TUC lead a campaign of mass ‘non-cooperation and non-compliance’ and called for an emergency conference of the TUC to fight the Bill if it becomes law.
This call has been completely ignored by the TUC who clearly are not prepared to break any Tory anti-union laws.
The working class is more powerful than the Tories and all their anti-union laws and the time has come for workers to force the TUC to call a general strike to smash the anti-union laws and bring down the Tory government and bring in a workers’ government and a planned socialist economy.