Hugh Reilly: Set for mother of all battles on pay front

Published on Monday 14 March 2011 14:26

IN OCTOBER 2002, Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, displayed his faith in democracy by sanctioning a simple "yes/no" referendum on his leadership.

In a remarkable feat, the returning officers managed, overnight, to gather and count all 11 million votes. Back in his Baghdad presidential palace, Saddam and his campaign team could only wait and wonder. One can imagine Hussein's joy when it was revealed that a resounding 100 per cent of the electorate had voted "yes".

His previous referendum victory in 1995 had been something of a more nailbiting affair whereby he secured a miserable 99.96 per cent, a depressing result that caused media pundits to question if he had a mandate to rule.

This week, teachers who are members of the EIS union will vote on whether to accept or reject proposals to alter their working conditions. They will also indicate if they are prepared to take industrial action to defend conditions of service. My best guess is that the outcome of the secret ballot will be an overwhelming rejection of the proposals and a Saddamesque vote in favour of workplace disruption.

The EIS salaries committee is recommending rejection of the proposals put forward by the Cosla/Scottish Government elements of the tripartite SNCT (Scottish Negotiating Committee for Teachers). Had the teachers' representative accepted the changes, classroom staff would have insisted each signatory be given a room in the Hilton with a pen, a single sheet of notepaper and a loaded gun on the bedside table.

Teachers are not unreasonable people. Like all public sector employees, they read newspapers and are aware that the country's finances are in need of correction. Although a bitter pill to swallow, I think most reluctantly accept the two-year wage freeze. With inflation running at about 5 per cent, this salary sacrifice represents a tithe reduction in remuneration.

Other proposed changes will not ignite a tweed-jacketed rush to man the barricades. Those who currently milk the cow without feeding it - teachers on a conserved salary doing the work of an ordinary dominie - will, rightfully in my opinion, stop receiving their unearned bonus in 2016. Indeed, heaven forfend, they may be redeployed to other schools to perform the duties for which they are presently being paid responsibility money.

The Chartered Chancer, sorry, Teacher Scheme is to be suspended forthwith. You can't blame teachers for taking this preposterous self-select route to riches, but the freezing of the programme is inevitable, given tight education budgets.

Probationer teachers will be expected to have increased contact-time with pupils, not a bad thing in my book. This less corseted -oops - cossetted approach to those entering the petticoat profession will help weed out potential classroom duds at an early stage.Currently, newbies are limited to 15.75 hours of face-time with the cherubs; from August 2011, this rises to 18.5 hours - still a long way short of a seasoned chalkie's 22.5 hours.

I think a straw poll of teachers would show that the aforementioned changes to conditions are not worthy of strike action. However, teachers are taking the hump over other, more controversial proposals. A straw that threatens to break the back of teacher camels is the suggestion to tinker with annual leave. There is a suggestion that leave entitlement be reduced to 40 days per annum, the balance of the current entitlement (approximately four weeks) being redefined as School Closure. How this alteration would affect the configuration of the school year is unclear.

Also unsettling is the intention to pay only 90 per cent of salary to absent staff. Even though such a move would impact on a minority of teachers, there is unease at an attack on a vulnerable group. Classroom teachers are further upset by the targeting of those professional colleagues with least clout, ie supply teachers, without whom no education establishment could function. Bully-boy tactics of Point 1 on the pay scale being used as the basis for paying temporary teachers is worse than kicking a man when he is down: it is doing a gleeful jig on his battered corpse. This mean-spirited policy to drive down the wages of casual staff makes the union mob in On The Waterfront look like model employers. Let the voting begin.