On Thursday 16th May we held our first meeting to begin mapping pay and conditions for TEFL workers across London and we had an excellent turnout with truly inspiring speeches from Hugh Dellar and our friends at the British Council in Taiwan. Everyone who came filled out our survey, and we will soon be launching … Read more
FREE ALDO, ARAFAT, CARLO AND BRUNO NOW! On Tuesday July 19 at dawn, a warrant from the Piacenza prosecutor’s office placed S.I. Cobas national coordinator Aldo Milani and three organisers of the Piacenza-based union (Mohamed Arafat, Carlo Pallavicini, and Bruno Scagnelli) under house arrest, together with two organisers of USB, another Italian rank-and-file union. More … Read more
Language teachers at Northumbria University are in dispute with their employer. The dispute stems from the fact that the teachers are currently entitled to one hour of paid prep time for each hour of teaching and the university wants to reduce that by half. There is a currently a public petition asking university management to reconsider, which … Read more
Ukraine, TEFL and the Politics of War and ‘Extremism’ What can a charity football match teach us about about UK foreign policy and domestic policies like Prevent? Quite a lot it turns out. In the article below, a member and activist with the TEFL Workers’ Union looks into the unspoken politics of a charity football … Read more
The TEFL Workers’ Union was delighted to read Alice Rodgers’ article in the EL Gazette, Can we disentangle TEFL from its colonial past? Alice looks at the myriad of ways that TEFL is inextricably linked to global structures of empire, oppression, and exploitation. Self-perception and reality TEFL views itself as a largely liberalising force for … Read more
As employers across the globe continue to use the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis to attack working conditions, staff at the British Council are being balloted for strike action by their union, PCS. The dispute centres on the failure of the British Council to properly consult on redundancies as well as threats to privatise … Read more