Defending Reps

SUPPORT FOR LOCAL OFFICERS

DEFENDING REPS – COLLECTIVE ACTION TO DEFEAT MANAGEMENT BULLIES

Derek McMillan (West Sussex NUT)

Last year’S NUT COnference agreed that “bullying is best

challenged by a collective and organised response”.

P

The union rep at a school “somewhere in Sussex” was targeted for redundancy by the head teacher.

utting this policy into practice is going to be vital if the Union is going to succeed in building school-based action – particularly where that leaves the school NUT representative vulnerable to attacks from a bullying management.

Successful trade union organisation has always depended on, in each workplace, a courageous rep that enjoys the support of his or her colleagues and his or her union. Employers have always known that if they can break the rep, they may well have broken the union.

The traditional ways for Headteachers to bully a rep through spurious capability procedures and changes in the timetable to induce more stressful working conditions are being augmented with intensified performance management regulations which offer ever more ways to put an assertive rep in their place.

The union rep at a school “somewhere in Sussex” was targeted for redundancy by the head teacher. There were a lot of issues which had arisen at the school and the union reps of all three unions were at the centre of the demands arising from the staff involving allegations of bullying by the head. The regional office intervened and all three unions held a meeting to agree a form of words to present to the governors.

Teachers had been forbidden by the head to talk to governors. Since the NUT rep was married to a governor this didn’t make things straightforward!

There was a petition signed by all of the staff except senior management who were forbidden to sign it – but one of them did anyway.

The meeting also agreed a proposal from to hold a ballot the following week - when OFSTED would be on the premises and the eyes of the local press focussed on the school.

The head decided that discretion was the better part of valour and perhaps the financial circumstances of the school were not all that bad and, as the NUT had suggested at the outset, the reserves could take the strain.

The net result was that not only was the rep’s job saved – for which he is eternally grateful – but the head was then unable to make anybody else redundant either. The NUT remains the largest union in the school to this day.

Successful trade unions have always known that the best response to attempts to intimidate their workplace reps is collective industrial action. The St.Helens / West Sussex amendment (52.1) gives 2007 NUT Conference the chance to make sure that this approach becomes the clear policy of the Union.