Schools Strikes Will Damage Children's Education

This week’s strikes will only serve to damage the education of thousands of children in Southampton and disrupt the lives of hard working parents. Many parents will themselves lose a day’s pay as they have to take the day off work and others will have to pay the cost of making alternative child care arrangements.

Southampton’s schools are driving up standards and results are improving year after year. One of the key drivers of improvement is better attendance. The more children are in school the better they do. The reverse is true; the more children miss school the more this sets back their progress. Strikes this week and perhaps in coming months are therefore damaging and wrong.

Schools in Southampton will be doing their best under these difficult circumstances; with some able to keep their school open or partly open for some year groups, or able to facilitate self study for older children.

Schools need to know how many teachers will be off work and how many are working in order to plan ahead, to communicate early with parents and to run an open or partly open school on the day. It is therefore deeply irresponsible of some of the more militant elements among the union leaders to be advocating that teachers refuse to tell their school if they will be in work or not. This is designed to maximise disruption to the school and to parents and ultimately to the education of children in the city. The union leaders should respect the right of teachers to come into school and teach if they choose and I am sure parents across the city will be very thankful to those that do.

Politics should be kept out of schools and the focus of everyone – school heads, the unions, the teaching profession and parents should be on delivering for children.

Labour/Union Pay Deal Will Cost Jobs and Services

A deal between the union bosses and the new Labour Administration was always going to come fairly quickly once the elections were over. The industrial action was political from the start, with the senior union negotiators all Labour Party people. However the recently announced deal doesn't mark the end of this sordid story. The cost of the deal is £2.8M a year, and this comes on top of the very large budget gap that the council faces in order to balance the books. The previous Conservative administration made terms and condition changes to keep more people in work and to protect the services that residents rely on.

The price of the Labour/Union deal will be lost jobs and services. However we won't know exactly who and what will be axed until November when next year's draft council budget is published.

Labour and the union bosses are keeping that information under wraps until after the council staff are balloted on the pay deal. It is very underhand to present this as good news to staff and ask them to vote on it and then a month later reveal to them exactly what it costs to pay for it in lost jobs and services.

We have already seen the start of Labour's cuts hitting the front line. The pay agreement alone is the equivalent of 10 Oaklands Pool closures.

It’s a deal that favours better paid staff and it is likely that it will be lower paid staff that bear the brunt of the job cuts.

Under the Conservative Council those earning less than £17,500pa (40% of staff) received a pay rise. The Conservatives were offering to protect those on £22,000pa and under from pay cuts and restore previous pay cuts, backdating them until last summer. It is ironic that the vast majority of bin men would have been better off under that arrangement, by about £600 compared with Labour/Union deal. Labour and unions were happy to use bin men for their own means during the strike but have secured them a worse deal.

This new deal will also be cold comfort to those staff which the union leaders managed to convince were due thousands and thousands of pounds if they took the council to court.

The tragic outcome of this long political campaign will be felt not only by staff themselves when Labour announce their extra job losses but by the residents of the city who will see more of their services axed.

Labour Behind Council Strikes

Labour Councillors and Labour Activists in the trade unions have been working together to disrupt services and cause misery for Southampton residents.
 
Last summer Labour even went as far as supporting the strikes that threatened to damage the port and disrupt the local economy.

As recently as the February Council Meeting Labour were holding rallies with the unions and backing further disruption in the city. Labour activists in the unions have said that intend to try and disrupt the opening of the city's new Sea City Museum on 10th April, coinciding with the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, a commemorative day and a day when the media will be focused on Southampton.

Labour's behaviour has been disgraceful and they have made it very clear that they put their own narrow political interests ahead of the city and local residents.

Further details of how Labour and the unions have been working together to try to wreck Southampton can be found HERE.