HUNDREDS of thousands of teachers, university workers, civil servants and transport workers are striking in the biggest strike day in more than a decade today.
Next Monday and Tuesday hundreds of thousands of nurses, ambulance workers and other NHS workers are also striking again.
NEU teachers union joint General Secretary Kevin Courtney said yesterday: ‘We are hearing stories every day of special needs assistants leaving jobs in schools to work in supermarkets, leaving children without support, GCSE classes being taught by someone, doing their best but who doesn’t have a qualification in the subject, primary classes where there are a succession of temporary teachers because they can’t hold onto permanent teachers.
‘There is disruption every day in our schools because the government isn’t investing in our schools or the people who work in them.
‘The whole point of this is to put pressure on government to come to the table so we can stop the disruption that is happening in schools every day.
‘We want our strike to be effective. It’s not the same as a natural phenomenon like Covid where we would be doing everything we could to make sure schools are running as well as possible.
‘We are in dispute, we are on strike, our members are giving up their day’s pay, for a noble purpose by the way, of trying to improve education by improving the funding and the pay of the people who work in our schools.
‘They are giving up their pay for a noble purpose, we want their sacrifice to be effective, we want government to feel that they have to talk to us so that there isn’t another strike on February 28th, March 1st, March 2nd, March 15 and 16th, the dates that we’ve identified. We want to avoid those strikes and that means we want this strike to be as effective as possible.’
Asked why the talks failed on Monday, Courtney replied: ‘Because the minister brought no proposals whatsoever to the table. She brought nothing whatsoever on pay this year or next year, no suggestion of a non-consolidated lump sum, no suggestion of a pay rise.
‘On the other hand we took to her a comprehensive set of data from bodies which aren’t unions pointing to the relative decline in teacher pay since 2010 as a real problem for recruitment and retention.’
• 70,000 University and College Union (UCU) members at 150 universities are walking out on strike today in their dispute over pay, working conditions and pensions. UCU general secretary Jo Grady said: ‘University vice-chancellors have been given multiple opportunities to use the sector’s vast wealth to resolve these disputes. Instead, they have forced staff back to the picket line and brought disruption to students.’