Members of the Association of University Teachers, who will be voting this coming autumn on the AUT’s proposed merger with the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education to create the world’s largest post-16 teaching union, might do well to study the report in this week’s Times Educational Supplement of NATFHE’s annual conference last weekend, which suggests that their future union bedfellows subscribe to the Jacques Chirac/Bashir Assad model of democracy. Delegates voted to support the merger with just one no vote and one abstention — a voting achievement which might just have something to do with the plangent complaint voiced by Craig Lewis of Deeside College, Flintshire, who said:

‘The members of the union have been kept at arms length from these negotiations. The key question is what kind of a union we end up with. We don't need a union controlled from above, with information drip-fed to members.’

And this from former NATFHE president Tina Downes, who said:

‘It's been a top-down process. The branches have not had a go at it. We all want to be in the same union, but we may have to be a little patient.’

The report also tells us that no-one at the conference believed ordinary members of either union would vote against the merger. So it would seem to be a done deal. The members who have been kept at arm’s length will dutifully behave like turkeys voting for Christmas. For although NATFHE’s leader, revolutionary poster-boy Paul Mackney, promised that

‘A single union will be much more effective in the face of employer intransigence over pay and much more influential in dialogue with government over education policy’,

what can AUT members actually look forward to? Well, strikes, for a start. As Mackney told the conference, unless new pay scales were paid

‘there will be a national strike in colleges’

. But just how will striking FE lecturers enable AUT university lecturers to be more effective in negotiating with different sets of employers over their different – and better -- pay, terms and conditions?

As for ‘influence over education policy’, AUT members can look forward to Mackney’s intention to

* end the independent peer-reviewed research assessment quality review which rates Universities for the quality of research and recommends funding accordingly

* treat all institutions from adult basic literacy institutions to
leading research universities as basically the same institutions

* campaign on a far-left political agenda reflecting, for instance, the subtle and nuanced position Mackney displayed on the Iraq war demo when he articulated the cerebral view

‘We're here to give Bush the push’

and signing up of course to the campaign for the total boycott of Israel to which his union is affiliated -- no doubt making generous exceptions for Israelis who denounce their own country in proper Stalinist style.

In his conference speech, Mackney claimed that

‘AUT members are just as ready as we are to resist Charles Clarke's brave new world of house arrest for those who fail to keep up with their top-up fee repayments and orange-uniforms for any protesting pensioner caught sheltering under the hood of a duffel coat.’

AUT members will no doubt be marvelling at their good fortune that they are about to come under the control of a union leader who already knows what they think without even asking them! It might just occur to one or two of them that there is an enormous issue here that needs somewhat more urgent attention than employer intransigence over pay or top-up fees. It is the issue of democracy -- their own democracy, which appears to be about to be erased by a merger that is a done deal without any proper information, and no possibility of amending an agreement to which they are being obediently corralled like sheep and which will deliver them up to a union whose internal structure emasculates members’ own voices so that any objections they may wish to make to the strikes, political grandstanding or imposition of identicality on institutions that are very different from each other will never be heard.

If I were an AUT member, I would wish to stop this anti-democratic juggernaut in its tracks.

Posted by melanie at June 6, 2005