This test is to be completed at home while school is closed as a result of industrial action. All questions must be completed. The answers supplied are intended only as samples and must not, under any circumstances, be repeated in the work you hand up to your teacher.
Q1
"The aim of all industrial action by trade unions is to cause so much trouble to the employers that the cost of meeting at least some of the union's demands is less than the cost of allowing the action to continue." Discuss with particular reference to the ASTI's campaign for a 30 per cent pay rise.
The ASTI's campaign is certainly causing trouble for the Government, for students and for parents. But the problem for the ASTI is that, no matter how much disruption it causes, conceding its demands will always be more troublesome than holding out against them. Far from putting out a fire, the concession of a 30 per cent pay rise for one year alone would start a conflagration that would consume the entire Programme for Prosperity and Fairness. So long as the PPF holds together, the Government simply cannot give secondary teachers pay rises that would breach its terms.
The only thing that might change this equation is the collapse of the PPF anyway and especially the disaffection of the other teacher unions. Ironically, this means that the ASTI's action gives extra muscle to the INTO and the TUI, rather than to its own members. To defeat the ASTI, the Government will keep it isolated by being nice to the other teacher unions. Joe O'Toole can say, as so many Northern Irish politicians have done over the years, "Deal with us, or you'll have to deal with the hard men out there in the hills."
This is great for the INTO and TUI but terrible for the ASTI. From a position of some power and influence within the trade union movement, it has accidentally turned itself into a white-collar version of the ILDA - a breakway union outside the loop and left to its own devices. Like the ILDA, it will be pushed towards the tactics of desperation. Instead of blocking train lines, teachers will find themselves blocking next year's exams. As the temperature rises, public sympathy will evaporate, bitterness will increase and the task of finding a resolution will become ever more difficult.
This is not good strategy. A good case for significant pay rises and a great deal of initial public sympathy are being squandered by a campaign in which the union seems to have no clear sense of its own bottom line or of how it is going to actually reach a deal. Is 30 per cent for one year a real demand or an opening bid? What, if anything, are teachers prepared to concede in order to achieve it? It is by no means clear that the ASTI, even in its own collective mind, has answers to these basic questions.
Q2
"The ASTI's campaign is poorly thought out because it is driven as much by anxieties about status as by concrete financial concerns." Discuss.
Shortly after the foundation of the ASTI in 1909, the new association met with the Catholic Headmasters' Association to discuss "the desire of the secondary teachers to raise their status". From its inception, status *SDA a vague but powerful concept which includes but is not confined to relative levels of pay - has been a key ASTI concern.
Concern for the status of teachers is not mere snobbery. It has a rational basis, not just in the minds of teachers themselves but in good public policy. Few would argue with the ASTI's notion that schools have contributed hugely to Ireland's economic success. Given the relative absence of material resources, it would be hard to deny that the key factor in the performance of Irish schools has been the quality of teaching. Experience elsewhere (in Britian and the US, for example) suggests that once teaching ceases to be a respected profession, it is very hard to undo the damage subsequently. The case for preserving the high status of teachers, therefore, is very strong.
The difficulty, however, is that many teachers seem to be still working off a notion of status that no longer applies. Long ago and far away, in the distant land that once was Ireland, the teacher was part of small local elite, along with the priest, the TD, the auctioneer, the solicitor, the publican-cum-grocer and a few strong farmers. That Ireland is dead. High status now belongs to people with a level of material wealth and conspicuous consumption to which no teacher can possibly aspire. But neither can the vast majority of white-collar graduates. No conceivable pay rise, let alone the famous 30 per cent, is going to close the gap between the man and woman at the blackboard and the high-tech Loadsamoney millionaire in the open-top Merc. If that's the standard for judging status (and statements by ASTI leaders suggest that it is) then the whole campaign is based on a fantasy.
The reality, perhaps, is that the class resentment that is driving the campaign is aimed downwards rather than upwards. What makes the ASTI's industrial action so odd for a trade union is that it is fuelled, at least in part, by a fear of becoming working-class. Last January, when the ASTI's central executive council met to discuss its pay claim, the union officials were left in no doubt that the membership was fed up with the social partnership model advocated by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. According to the union newsletter, "CEC members also expressed concern that the social inclusion agenda of Congress and its concern for the lower paid was not the agenda of the ASTI."
The anxiety about status is thus essentially a fear that teachers are being subsumed by social inclusion into the mass of ordinary workers. The irony here is that the whole point of the ASTI as a trade union has long been to establish precisely that teachers are workers. Against the religious model that spoke of teaching as a missionary vocation, the ASTI fought to establish that its members are people doing a job of work.
The unresolved tension over issues like voluntary supervision and parent-teacher meetings points to continuing contradiction between these two models. Oddly, in their current campaign, the ASTI has relied very heavily on the old vocational model that they have fought against for so long. The emphasis has been on the voluntary extras rather than on the core job. Again, this seems a strange strategy. It ends up de-valuing the basic, essential job that teachers do - working on the curriculum in the classroom. Instead of raising the status of teaching, it undermines it.
Q3
Suggest ways in which the current problem could be solved. (Note: anyone producing a half-way decent answer will be awarded a place in a third-level institution of choice, without having to sit the Leaving Cert.)
On the one hand, the teachers have to give the Government a way to give them a decent pay rise that does not create more industrial relations problems than it solves. One way out is for the ASTI to declare a partial victory and move on. Its action, after all, has already achieved something substantial. It is clear that the benchmarking process under the PPF will be moved forward, and that real benefits could flow from it. There is still, just about, time for a strategic re-think by the ASTI to be presented as something other than a climbdown. This can be done by entering into discussions in the first instance with the other teacher unions.
The INTO and TUI, who have similar concerns as the ASTI but are pursuing them through different channels, could be the bridge between what are, at the moment, irreconcilable positions. A common platform producing a joint engagement with the benchmarking body would be immensely powerful. It could demand an equivalent to the Commission on Nursing - long overdue anyway. Most importantly, a joint approach within the PPF would be knocking on an open door. The terms of the equation would be changed in the teachers' favour. A generous settlement would then, for the Government, solve more problems than it would create.
On the other hand, the Government can do much more than simply repeating the same formula about negotiating within the PPF. The fact that the ASTI's strategy and demands are poorly thought-out does not mean that the unrest is unreal. Even if there was no industrial action, the Government should be thinking very carefully about how to preserve one of the State's biggest assets - good, highly motivated teachers. The appointment of a Commission on Teaching would be a good move even if there was not a crisis. On one side, there are large areas of the operation of schools - supervision, parent-teacher links, in-service training, methods of assessment, school inspection, performance standards, accountability - that need to be resolved. On the other, there is a teaching body that is no longer convinced that its role in society is valued. Between those two sets of concerns, there is what the current dispute so critically lacks: room to manoeuvre.
