We recognise that support staff are usually the most underpaid and undervalued workers in the sector.
We believe that significant improvements for support staff will only occur when – like teachers – the majority of them are in a union. At the minute, the overwhelming majority of support staff are not in any union. This has to change.
The NEU is not recognised for national bargaining at NJC level. The recognised unions are Unison, GMB and Unite. Therefore we were not part of the negotiations that led to your 3.2% pay agreement this year. Indeed when we have balloted our members to demand funding for a decent pay rise the NJC unions complained about us and we were fined over £150,000 by the TUC.
In the last few weeks we have again been disciplined by TUC, merely for saying that we want support staff to be organised into effective unions.
We do not want to take members from any existing union. But we do want to see the 100s of 1000s of support staff not in a union become organised. We think it is a destructive waste of time and money to attack other unions. That time and money would be much better spent helping support workers in our view.
We want all four unions with support staff members to work together to improve your working lives.
Although we are not part of the national pay negotiations, we are present in every school and college in England and Wales.
It is in the workplace where we can and do represent members and fight for better conditions. In recent weeks NEU support staff – often united with teachers - have defeated redundancy proposals, won reductions in workload and in some cases, even won a 4% pay rise in line with the award for teachers.
If all four unions worked together – and wherever possible united with teachers – we think that more could be achieved.
The TUC have convened a meeting for all four unions to see if our differences can be resolved amicably. NEU sincerely hope that these talks are successful and lead to a joint, united organising drive in the sector. We have made it clear that we are open to any suggestions that are in the interests of support members. But we have also made it clear that the current situation, where support staff are so poorly treated must be more effectively challenged. The NEU are committed to this and want to work in unity with anyone else who feels the same way.