Lessons in organising: What trade unionists can learn from the war on teachers by Little, G., Sharp, E., Stevenson, H., & Wilson, D. (2023). London: Pluto Press. Paperback ISBN: 9780745345222, £7.49
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| Author | Lorena Gazzotti |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12765 |
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right to abuse workers simply because they pay for an individual’s time. The most common form
of resistance is simply to leave the workplace (p. 135) and the final, most emphatic solution is
to opt out of life completely, as is demonstrated in the rise in suicides in electronics factories in
Southeast Asia (p. 56).
‘How We Struggle’ is an excellent presentation of worker struggles across many different con-
texts both spatially and temporally. While much is difficult to read for those who are empathetic
to the difficult situations’ large numbers of workers, waged and unwaged, find themselves in, it
is a book that leaves the reader with great hope for continued effective struggle in the future.
DOI: 10.1111/b jir.12765
Lessons in organising: What trade unionists can learn from the war on
teachers
by Little, G., Sharp, E., Stevenson, H., & Wilson, D. (2023). London: Pluto Press.
Paperback ISBN: 9780745345222, £7.49
Lorena Gazzotti
University of Cambridge Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge
This is why education is political. It is always political, because it is fundamentally a
struggleoverwhatthefuturecanlooklike[...].Itisinevitable,therefore, that teach-
ers have found themselves in the front line of these struggles, as it is in the daily
actions of teachers that competing visions of education emerge (Little et al., 2023:3)
In 2023, the National Education Union, the largest European education union representing
teaching and support staff in UK schools, sent shockwaves within the UK education system by
winning an aggregated ballot that subsequently led to thousands of teachers across the country
take strikefor 8 days between February and July of this year. The industrial dispute centred around
pay restoration.The union demanded the Conservative government table an inflationary-adjusted
pay offer to be funded through a proportional increase in the budget available to schools. Such a
huge campaign was the culmination of over a decade of deliberate union building pursued by the
NEU and its predecessor (the National Union of Teachers — NUT).
‘Lessons in Organising. What trade unionists can learn from the Waron Teachers’ is a refresh-
ingly honest account of the ‘turn to organising’ embraced by the NEU. Written by a mix of union
staff, lay members and a researcher, the book retraces the decade of union ‘renewal’ that the
NUT and the NEU pursued to expand and strengthen its organising structures. Such strategy was
implemented on the back of decades of attacks on teachers’ pay and working conditions, and of a
deliberate neoliberalisation of the UK education system by successive governments — chiefly,but
not only,under Conservative Party mandates. The book is in direct conversations with other works
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