We at the TEFL Workers’ Union stand in solidarity with striking teachers and admin staff all over the country.
We would like to express our solidarity with all UCU’s demands listed below:
- address the scandal of the gender, ethnic, and disability pay gap
- end contract casualisation and rising job insecurity
- tackle the rising workloads driving staff to breaking point
- increase to all spine points on the national pay scale of £2,500.
As a fellow education union we are disappointed that higher education increasingly relies upon insecure contracts and forces teaching staff to exist in perpetual precarity. Wages have stagnated, and pensions have been slashed. This treatment is unacceptable in any form of employment.
For many of us in the TEFL industry, these issues will be very familiar; indeed, our schools often take insecure contracts, stagnant pay and unpaid work simply as a given. We know what the marketisation of education feels like – and we’ve been fighting back against it – because that’s what the TEFL industry has been based on for years.
Decreasing staff levels. Increased workloads. A general atmosphere of austerity. An epidemic of overwork is not conducive to the pedagogical relationship of trust needed for the university to function.
The strike highlights the increasing marketisation of education. We in TEFL know this all too well. Students, coming to the UK from every corner of the world to study English, pay exorbitant sums and incur mounting debts in their home countries.
These exploitative fees are not used to provide decent working conditions for teachers and administrative staff. Rather, they’re used to line the profits of millionaire and billionaire owners. It’s not acceptable in TEFL and it’s not acceptable in higher education.
Stand strong on the picket line fellow workers.
Solidarity with increasingly casualised and marginalised workers in higher education. TEFL teachers have been casualised and marginalised for decades. Using honest subtitles for employers’ lines: “Lucky to have any kind of a job.” “Plenty more where you came from.” “We abide by market norms, and in the market, you’re like mushrooms: kept in the dark and fed shit.”