Are SNP supporters correct to have suspicions about a teacher's strike?

Last week, EIS members voted quite decisively (by 57% to 43%, on a high turnout) to reject the latest pay offer from the employers’ side. The union’s executive has now initiated a statutory strike ballot for March 11. This ballot will run for three and a half weeks. Assuming the membership supports action, strikes could begin on April 24, just as we approach exam season – though EIS are careful to say they won’t disrupt SQA examinations.

READ MORE: Teaching strikes loom after EIS union reject pay deal

Many Yes supporters see the EIS threat to strike – despite what may be considered a good pay offer in the current budgetary circumstances – as a politically motivated attack on the SNP government. They point to the fact that last October Richard Leonard (pictured below with Jeremy Corbyn), the Scottish Labour leader, was invited to address an EIS rally in Glasgow. Some SNP members are even resigning from the union. Is this suspicion justified?

We can discount some of these worries quite quickly. The EIS rally at which Leonard spoke had invitees from all the political parties. It was also addressed by SNP MP Chris Stephens, by Ross Greer of the Scottish Greens, and STUC president Lynn Henderson, who is not unsympathetic to independence. True, Leonard got lots of media coverage for denouncing SNP “austerity”, but that’s typical of the Unionist TV and press.

Unlike other trades unions, the EIS is not affiliated to the Labour Party – though traditionally its leaders were sympathetic to Labour. The late, great John Pollock spurned the pointless life of a Scottish Labour backbencher to be EIS general secretary for nearly 20 years. He used that position to fight his own party machine – successfully – in favour of Scottish devolution. I see no evidence that Labour moles are busy subverting the current EIS. Anyway, with over 50,000 members, EIS is a difficult bunch to subvert.

How good a deal is on offer? The award comes in two parts. First there are three consecutive, three-point rises in salary for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020. In the first year, the 3% rise is capped for salaries above £80,000 (ie “heedies”). So, basically a three-year package worth 9% in total come April next year.

Ross Greer addressed the rally

Part two of the offer covers changes to the existing salary scale. Scottish teachers get automatic salary increments for the first six years in the job. The new offer shortens the scale by a year and increases individual scale points (not total salary) by 3%. Of course, if you’re at the top of the scale already, you don’t benefit. Besides, pay scales are just a way of deferring the payment of a proper salary.

Why does a teacher whose been in the job for five years get less money than someone doing the very same job for six years? Also, the proffered changes to pay scales come with strings in the shape of so-called “job sizing”. In days of yore, this was called a productivity agreement.

Surely the Scottish Government is being as generous as it can be, given the purse-strings are held by the Tory Treasury in London? There’s a truth in that. Average weekly earnings in the UK are growing at an annualised 3.5%. By that measure, the package offered to Scottish teachers is fair. However, we need to take inflation into account. Even with inflation subsiding a bit, the real impact on teachers’ earnings is likely to be an increase of a bit over 1% per year. If Brexit pushes up prices, the net impact on real incomes could be zero.

It is indubitably true that the SNP government has protected Scottish teachers from the full blast of Tory austerity. For instance, an independent survey conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that teachers’ salaries in Scotland were worth 6% less in 2015 compared to 2005 – but those in England were down twice as much, at 12%. However, being told one’s real income has fallen less than in England does not pay the supermarket bill in Glasgow, Edinburgh or Dundee.

Trades unions in a democratic society are not there to serve the interests of the government, even a sympathetic SNP one. It’s the union’s job to fight austerity on behalf of its members. In fact, the major problem since 2008 is that the unions, for the most part, failed to do that. In the three decades after the Second World War, the share of wages in UK national income rose dramatically as a result of union militancy securing generous wage increases. In the late 1950s, real household disposable income was rising at 5% and 6% per annum – despite tax increases!

In the early 1970s, when union membership was at its zenith, real disposable household income peaked at 8.4% per annum.

The lead was given by the car workers, whose shop-steward network escaped control of the union bureaucracy. Wage gains achieved by the car workers served as a benchmark for salary claims throughout the economy, including for public sector workers.

All that changed in the 1980s when Mrs Thatcher smashed union organisation. The Thatcherite narrative was that union militancy was ruining British industry. In fact, it was a lack of private sector investment that resulted in poor British productivity and competitiveness.

Rather than invest their own money, the private sector handed over the car, aerospace, ship-building and steel industry to the state during the 1970s.

The Wilson-Callaghan Labour governments then fought a ruthless campaign to impose wage restraint on their own supporters. Stupidly, many English working-class voters responded by voting in Thatcher, like turkeys voting for Christmas. Thatcher then effectively closed the British-owned car industry down, killing the shop-stewards movement. The share of wages in GDP promptly collapsed and working people have lived off their credit cards ever since.

Chuck in post-2008 austerity and you can understand why the teachers are angry.

Here’s my point: Scottish teachers should be seen as an ally of the independence movement – as a social battering ram against Westminster austerity. Especially if we get a hard Brexit.

If the teachers get 10%, everyone could get 10%. We need to shift the balance of income in GDP back to those who work and produce the wealth. The only choice for the SNP government is whether to bow to the UK Treasury and stay within prescribed spending limits, or pay the teachers the full 10% by borrowing – and defy Westminster

The same OECD study quoted above found that in other industrial countries, teachers’ salaries went up in real terms between 2005 and 2015. In other words, despite the 2008 global economic crisis – perhaps because of it – other industrial countries have pumped money into education and training. There is a profound lesson here for Scotland.