Industrial unionism

Today, support staff at Ash Field Academy in Leicester are once again on strike to demand that management stop victimising their union rep, Tom Barker. Following previous strikes, once again a lively picket gathered outside the school. The support staff strikers were joined by Unison activists from...

I was on the picket line at Priory Catholic Academy in Eastwood, Notts. This is a small, single-form entry primary school. Priory is one of eight schools on strike in the St Ralph Sherwin Multi-Academy Trust. For reasons that have yet to be explained by the Trust, the organisation is £10 million in...

NEU teachers and support staff at Samworth Church Academy have taken seven days of strike action against management bullying, which included managers arranging disciplinary meetings with staff in front of students and worse. Samworth Church Academy has never been involved in strike action before...

The National Education Union (NEU) held a special conference on Saturday 28 February to decide whether to actively recruit and organise support staff. Workers’ Liberty supporters, who work alongside other activists in the union in Educators’ Fightback, have argued for the union to do this since the...

Support staff are the lowest paid in our workplaces. Many have more than one job, resort to using food banks and struggle to get by. Would your priority be paying union subs or putting food on the table? Every penny counts. If you were faced with the choice of joining a union with a low introductory...

There is a strange fatalism about the TUC in the discussion about NEU organising support staff. Leading people have been heard to say - including to other unions - that we will be out of the TUC after the special conference decision. The Executive’s motion for conference ends, strangely, with...

Here are Educators' Fightback's recommendations for voting on amendments at this Saturday's special NEU conference on organising support staff. Separate posts on the blog look at the issues in more depth. 1. against: sticks with 2017 agreement, which excludes NEU from the school support staff...

Saturday's NEU special conference is an opportunity for the union to take a historic step towards being able to fully represent its support staff members, now numbering 64,000, and becoming an industrial union for all workers in education. Our union has already taken decisions at annual conferences...

By Anthony Gardner Every year, cost-of-living pay increases are agreed for school support staff and backdated to April, but not at the Cathedral Schools Trust (CST) in Bristol, where the academy chain had been pocketing the money owed from April to September. Initial discussions ended with an...

Support staff members of the NEU and Unison at Cathedral Schools Trust (CST) in Bristol will strike from Wednesday 5 November over back-pay. Each year, a cost-of-living pay rise is agreed for support staff, and this should back-paid to staff from April. However, CST management have been paying back...