Organising in the workplace and delivering a political strategy
Part two of NEU leaders interview
[This is the second part of a discussion with the joint General Secretaries of the National Education Union. The first part was published earlier this week].
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It pays to read what conservatives have to say about the labour movement. Look no further than Conservative Home’s Mark Wallace, for his view of the effectiveness of one example of trade union campaigning.
“An under-appreciated factor in Jeremy Corbyn’s better than expected performance in 2017 was the punishing campaign by teaching unions aimed at parents of schoolchildren. The leaflets at school gates and viral online campaign arguing that your children’s education was underfunded or facing cuts reached millions of these voters, inflaming their concerns and playing havoc with the Tory campaign.
“If Keir Starmer is clever, he’ll replicate that approach.”
The lessons of that 2017 teaching union campaign formed part of the second half of the discussion with NEU joint general secretaries Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney, covering digital, organising and political strategy. These lessons are relevant not only to the unions themselves but also to the political parties they seek to influence.
We started with the NEU’s famous mass online meeting during the covid pandemic. Just one year ago the union organised a meeting of its members that was attended by 40,000 people and viewed by considerably more – estimates say over a million. “We think it's the biggest union meeting ever,” says Mary Bousted. “We were amazed by that.” She praises her “genius” staff for finding ways to make such a huge intervention possible.
Mary Bousted stresses the situation that led to the online mobilisation, to underline that mass meetings come from the combination of the particular issue or issues, and the solid work of the union. “That came about by particular set of circumstances - you don't get participation like that unless members are desperate to come to a meeting and that was at the point where Boris Johnson and Gavin Williamson were ordering primary teachers back into school, with the surge in the Delta variant and no vaccines. We knew we had to respond to that, our members were making it very clear we had to respond to that.”
Teachers had to take action because their health and safety – and indeed the impact on the wider community – was being ignored: “the next day we calculate the 25 per cent - a quarter of primary teachers - submitted a section 44 letter. That's astonishing, really, because primary teachers are not the most militant of our membership, but they did.”
Teachers were dealing with a poor Secretary of State for Education – Gavin Williamson – “who couldn't see an oncoming train until it's run him over. But to get twenty-five per cent of primary teachers to actually put their name on a section 44 letter and say I'm not entering the workplace because it's a danger to my health and safety, that's indicative of the times but it's also indicative that they turned to their union and their union came out with a response.”
Mary Bousted’s point is that digital and social media tools that expand the means through which the union communicates with its members – and vice versa. “I think we really aware that if we're going to survive, we have to be where the members are and that social media is a really, really important part of all that. We track it very carefully, we look at the metrics of it very carefully. And it's important to us for interacting with members.” These are additional tools, not replacements. “We don't think that social media and campaigning is a substitute for in-person meetings. We don't think it's a substitute for in-person organising in schools and colleges.”
For the NEU leadership there is a direct relationship between the use of data, digital and online campaigning, and organising in the workplace. Kevin Courtney: “This is the thing we have to reach for in the future. Because we don't have big workplaces, generally. You know UCU organises in workplaces where there might be 500 or 1000 members in one institution, or the CWU has really big sorting offices. Most primary schools will have twenty members or twenty teachers, so much smaller groups of members. And what we're interested in is how do we talk to members in those schools and show them through big data what's happening in their school compared with other schools? So we're looking at all the data sets that exist, and there are data sets that we are beginning to understand how to use. The proportion of teachers who are part time in any school is in a national data set that the government collects so if you want to do some work around flexible working, and you can see that in your school, hardly anyone is allowed to be part time, and we can present to you the number of teachers who are in your school who are part time, what the average is in your local area, what the national average is, we can give you information that you can use to then make your case to the head that actually you need to be a bit more flexible than this. It's happening everywhere else. So we're looking for ways of taking the big data using the big datasets that the government has, looking for ways of presenting it to members and then using it as an organising tool at that level.”
For Kevin Courtney, “we do not think that social media changes the world - we think it's a tool to help other people change the world.” And he refers back to that 2017 campaign cited by ConHome chief executive Mark Wallace.
“So the 2017 school cuts campaign that we were running at the time running as NUT and ATL - it was just pre- the formal amalgamation - that campaign was innovative, presented data to parents about the situation at their child's school. [It] made big data, big numbers, national big numbers and turned them into a number-per-child at your child's school. We had the technology to present that, and the good messaging instincts to present it right.” In turn, members and parents picked up that information and ran with it. “But we think that what happened then was that people turned that data using templates we gave them into local leaflets and then there was loads of school gate leafleting with it by our members, by other people. Members took leaflets and distributed them in their streets, as well. There was a mass engagement with that. We are we really are a nonpartisan union - so we weren't doing that to aid Labour, but the circumstances did aid Labour because Labour was offering more on school funding than the Conservatives and we presented the truth of the situation, and 750,000 people changed their votes because of that campaign, which was electronic but grassroots as well.”
It is no wonder that Conservative party supporters, right up to the leadership of the party, took note. By 2019, the Tories sought to head the problem off. Kevin Courtney:
“there's a bigger significance to it, that in the summer of 2019, Boris Johnson - knowing that he was about to call an election - they put billions of pounds into school budgets. That might have had all sorts of effects on the election itself. But the reason they put billions of pounds into education in 2019, was that we had scared them about the possibility of doing something around school budgets in an election. That's why I why I think I can say, in genuine sincerity that it's not partisan, what we're doing: we are fighting for education and in one election, we changed some votes, in the next election we got some money. It was that campaign that we ran, that our members were involved in, that got billions of pounds for schools.”
Mary Bousted argues that the teaching unions’ campaign in 2017 had sent a shock through Tory MPs: “when the Tory MPs were coming back after that election, they were knocking on their leader's door saying, I got hammered on the doorstep, or I lost the election and people were talking about school cuts,” adding: “The key thing about that was they couldn't hide it with big numbers because the genius of the school cut campaign was 'this is what your child's school is losing’.”
And if the 2017 campaign hit home to the Tories, Kevin Courtney also draws a lesson for the opposition. “I think there's something else I think it's important to say about that, is that campaign would not have worked in 2015. We could have done a campaign about the cuts that had happened, but another part of 2017 was we showed what the Labour manifesto, the Tory manifesto, and the LibDem manifesto meant for your school's funding. We turned their manifesto promises into a per-pupil thing at your child's school and in 2015 Labour's offer on school funding was packaged slightly differently, but it was essentially the same as the Conservatives' offer on school funding.”
In the end politics, and the offer that is made to the electorate, is key to the impact of ground activity like the teachers’ school cuts campaigns. “You can't just make a campaign because you've got good social media, there has to be something real about it.” Opposition parties will need to consider what that means for them in advance of the next general election.
One of the offshoots of Sharon Graham's election as the General Secretary of Unite is that more public attention is being paid to exactly these debates that trade unionists have been having for some time, about innovation, organising and how that relates to political strategy.
Kevin Courtney sees parallels. “The thing I was talking about earlier about getting the information about school level and presenting it as a tool to use for organising, Sharon is putting resources in - was before being GS - into a bargaining database, which has similar intentions, I think. Obviously, the circumstances are always different – Unite, largely organising in the private sector, so you've got an employer that determines the pay level. Doesn't really happen in schools, the pay level isn't determined at the school because it's determined at the governmental level, but still that bargaining thing there.”
He counsels against asserting false divides. “I think there's a false polarity in the debate around Sharon. So there are people I see who say Sharon is only interested in the workplace, not interested in the politics. That's not how I read what she's doing. It seems to me obvious that we need change, that working people need change at the workplace, and we need to revitalise the work that trades unions are doing at the workplace. But we also need change at governmental level and we need to pressurise political parties to change things for us, you know.” He points out that there used to be debates about whether trade unionists should be in favour of a minimum wage or whether you thought that trades union action should get wages up, whereas “you need both”.
An organising strategy and a political strategy can and should work hand in hand: “We need to focus on the workplace and we need to focus on the politics. You can be too obsessed about what a particular political party or a particular faction in a political party is saying but you absolutely have to have an eye to political change. Trades unions need to be able to assert themselves at a national level and look for political change. We won't get rid of Ofsted by working at the school level - and we do need to remove Ofsted off the neck of teachers and head teachers in our country.”
Mary Bousted agrees: “I think that what Sharon Graham is doing is highly political. It's just politics by different means.”
She argues that Unite’s new leader is saying “we've got to demonstrate that we can make a change in the workplace. And absolutely, that's what we believe too, that's why we've got the ‘value education, value educators’ orientation, which is about how do we get good work for teachers? How do we stop them doing this unnecessary work? How do we reduce working hours? How do we get more control over teachers' working lives? How do we get them better pay? But it's a complex orientation, which tries to respond to what members tell us are their key concerns. And I think that's what Sharon Graham is determined to do.”
Kevin Courtney goes onto discuss what the union aims to see from politicians on education including Labour: “We have to engage with the Labour Party as we find it.” He argues: “it seems to me Bridget Phillipson is landing a couple of punches on the government around ventilation, around the slow pace of vaccination, and it matters to us - again I need to reiterate our non-partisan nature - we're also pleased when Munira Wilson lands a punch for the for the LibDems. I said a nice thing about Robert Halfon that when he was saying before Christmas, you've got to do something to stop the de facto closure of schools. We've got to live in the political world as it is, even if we'd like to see the political world being different to the way it is. We've got to find allies. Robert Halfon would never be an ally, but we have to find allies to do things with us, we have to see where there are differences and seek to use those differences.”
In 2019 General Election, Labour and the LibDems were both quite close to the NEU in policy terms – Labour more so. As we have seen, the Tories were forced to try to take the heat out of the argument in order to avoid a repeat of 2017. The NEU’s approach going into the middle and end of this parliament will clearly include working on how it influences the main political parties over education policy. Kevin Courtney takes the opportunity to emphasise how unhelpful the government’s education agenda is for business. “Companies need people [to be] much more independent, not spoon-fed, they need people who are critical thinkers, they need people who are who are good team workers, who are entrepreneurial, and they're not getting that from the current education system.” He thinks there will be pressure for “big change” in assessment, and therefore, “we want to persuade Labour and the Lib Dems that they have to be on the same side as us because there is a division in the in the ruling party. We are talking to Tory backbenchers who agree with us.”
Mary Bousted also sees the possibility of pressure for change in education on the horizon: “There will be a reordering in education as we as we slip down the international league tables, as we will do as we are going on now. I think we can't underestimate that a government which wages a war on woke is a government which actually doesn't really care. It's just lurching from one thing to another. And, at the moment, rigour and exams and timed exams is just a useful symbol for order and authority. It's a simple way of talking about education, so they will be difficult to move.”
The change she wants to see involves politicians standing alongside teachers: “The question for us is how far can we get more considered policy, which will be so much better for children, young people and for their teachers? How can we get the opposition parties to start thinking about that seriously?”
As its record shows, the NEU’s campaigning and organising strength puts it in a very strong position to influence that debate.
· Thanks to Mary Bousted and Kevin Courtney for sparing the time.