Secondary teachers are expected to reject the Government's €34 an hour offer for supervision and substitution today. But it is uncertain whether this will unleash a fresh round of disruption in schools.
The result of the ASTI ballot on the offer will be known later this evening, but it is widely expected members will follow the lead set by their Central Executive Committee (CEC) and reject the offer, worth a total of about €1,300 a year to teachers.
The turnout in the ballot is expected be very low, with only about 40 per cent voting; this reflects widespread unease within the union about the failure of its pay campaign.
Less than one-quarter of ASTI members voted last December in a ballot on non co-operation with some Department of Education programmes.
The ASTI 23-member Standing Committee will meet this evening to decide the next move. The committee has become increasingly uncompromising in recent months with the departure of several members. But it is by no means clear if it will vote to issue a directive banning supervision and substitution.
Any such move would have very serious implications. In practice, schools could be forced to close if teachers withdrew from supervision and refused to provide cover for absent colleagues.
Last year, schools closed for several days at the height of the ASTI campaign when teachers refused to do supervision and substitution duties.
Late last year, ASTI members also voted to withdraw from supervision/substitution, but this was never activated. At the time, many members complained that they had been denied the right to vote on the Government's offer.
After the failure of the pay campaign, it is not clear if there is strong support within the union for further serious industrial action.
In a survey of members late last year, some 74 per cent defied the CEC and voted to forward ASTI's submission to the Labour Court to the benchmarking pay review body.
But the CEC remains opposed to benchmarking; it maintains that union policy should be dictated by annual conference and not any random survey of members.
•Meanwhile, the Minister for Education, Dr Woods, has said the practice of telling the ASTI when members want to stop paying union subscriptions has been stopped.
This follows a complaint from a Waterford teacher that a confidential letter to the Department spelling out his wish to end union deductions at source was forwarded without his permission to ASTI.
In the Dáil this week, Dr Woods said, "in the light of the circumstances of this case, the practice of sending copies of individual teacher's instructions to the organisation concerned [ASTI] has been stopped".