NEU Winning for our members - 2.75% and not a penny less

NEU Winning for our members - 2.75% and not a penny less. 



While a 2.75% pay rise for teachers is inadequate after their 15% drop in real terms pay since 2010, teachers will be aware that earlier this term, a 2.75% pay award was recommended by the STRB.  In the majority of local authorities in England, and in all NEU Northern based local authorities, councils have recommended to their local authority schools that the 2.75% pay award be paid to teachers in full.



However, this recommendation has to then be agreed by the schools governing body, and in one school in Cumbria recently, governors decided not to pay the full 2.75%, but instead decided to award staff a 2.00% pay rise, and told teachers that the 0.75% would be paid at a later date. 



NEU members were quite rightly not happy with the decision and thanks to the great work by NEU members, our NEU workplace rep and Cumbria NEU local officers, the schools governors have quite rightly reversed this decision, and all teachers will be paid the full 2.75% pay award, backdated to 1^st September 2019.



Why are we telling you this?

Because without NEU members being organised in their own school and having a great NEU rep, combined with the support of their local branch officers, this fight to get what every other school in Cumbria was awarding might never have happened.  People may have just accepted the matter, and got on with it.  But they didn’t. They got organised, and won on the issue affecting them all as a group of NEU members.



This issue was about pay, but regardless of the issue, to win in the workplace, being organised in your school is essential. 



If you do not have an NEU rep in school, get together as a group of members and elect one.



If you are an NEU rep, and maybe haven’t attended training. Come on our reps training. It’ll be the best 3 days training you attend.



Winning in the workplace is not about somebody from ‘the union’ coming in to fix things.  It is about the union being a visible and a united group of members in the workplace standing up for what is right.  You are the union.



Be active, and be loud and proud of being a NEU member, so everyone in your school knows about it, and get others to join you in the strongest and most effective education trade union in the UK.