‘Lessons in Organising’
On Wednesday 7 February, UCU Edinburgh hosted Gawain Little, General Secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions and co-author of the recently published book, Lessons in Organising: What Trade Unionists Can Learn from the War on Teachers. Due to a derailment on the east coast line, Gawain unfortunately had to join the first part of the evening via Zoom, speaking to us from a platform at Northallerton train station. To his great credit, he still delivered a fantastically rich, thorough and insightful talk that covered key moments and strategies in the National Education Union’s fightback against the UK government’s war on teachers.
Watch the recording on YouTube
Gawain’s talk led us through the period before the Covid-19 pandemic and the immense power built through the steady and consistent efforts of workplace reps and ‘intermediate leaders’ at the level of branches for the NEU. Crucially, these combined both political education, which included analysis of how the government’s education ‘reforms’ were eroding teachers’ autonomy and professionalism, and workplace organising, especially developing mechanisms for all staff in schools to relay their individual and collective concerns about their working conditions. These efforts bore fruit in the form of a 400,000-strong online meeting of NEU members collectively deciding not to return to work on 4 Jan 2021, following UK’s second lockdown. The government of Boris Johnson had been insisting that schools in England should reopen as planned, but in the face of this action, it was forced into a u-turn and announced that schools would remain closed.
The book sets out an analytical scheme for assessing the responses of unions, including the NEU, to the political and social context of austerity and long-term decline in membership. One approach is ‘rapprochement’, where unions find space to operate by working closely with management to make limited gains for their members. Another is ‘resistance’, which entails a reactive politics of protest that may also involve some industrial action. Given adverse political and economic conditions, this can be demoralising for some members. The third, ‘renewal’, the authors argue is key to understanding the NEU’s strength. Renewal involves forms of organising that bring in the diverse experiences of union members to ‘actively build the types of campaigns (industrial and political) that can force employers and governments to retreat’ (p.142).
Much of the analysis in this book is highly relevant to UCU and to workplace organising in universities. In particular, the focus on how teachers have been motivated to take action to defend their professional autonomy through union analysis that focuses on how this relates to the specifics of the labour process in schools has been central to the NEU’s efforts to connect organising in the workplace and the broader political, social and economic context. The authors argue that direct organising in the workplace is critical to building union power, as it creates the possibility of connecting this context and the struggles of individual members and groups of members.
Attended by members from UCU, Unison and EIS, the event was notable for the conversations it generated between us in terms of the hopes and ambitions we share for organising more effectively and with greater solidarity between members and unions. Our thanks to Gawain for sharing his time and his experiences with us, and to UCU Edinburgh’s Learning Rep, Dr Stuart Moir, for proposing and organising the event.