Solidarity with S.I. Cobas 

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

Interview: Dispute at Northumbria Language Centre

Solidarity with Northumbria University

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’

Your union your voice

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

ELT, Colonialism, and Capitalism: TEFL’s Gordian Knot

Image reads: "Another World is Possible" and has the logo of the IWW education workers

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

Solidarity with British Council Staff

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

The British Council and the PCS

The British Council is defining institution within the global ELT industry. With a potential strike looming at the BC, we hear what it was like to work at the BC as well as an analysis of how the current state of the BC fits into a wider shift towards neo-liberal economics. By a former British … Read more