Introduction

For about twenty years I worked in further education (FE) as an English teacher for adult students. FE is a type of education and training after secondary school that is distinct from that of universities and other higher education institutions. FE is where people do primarily vocational courses, such as in construction, catering or childcare, as well as pre-university study. Students in FE can also study Maths and English, including offering literacy classes for those who cannot read or write. In this sense, FE is generally for underserved populations.

For the most part, the students I taught came from widely diverse backgrounds, and they often struggled with a lot of difficulties in housing, with their health and so on. It always felt special to me when one of my students would come into the classroom and proudly tell me about something they’d done by themselves in English. For instance, a student once told me about how she had needed to make an urgent call because her child was very sick. Despite being scared, she had managed to answer all the questions in English and the health care worker understood everything she said. According to her, she had been able to do that thanks to our classes together.

Funding for FE has long been precarious. Immediately after the financial crash of 2008 the government cut FE funding by 40%. In general, the government has treated this part of the sector and its students as people to kick when they wanted or needed someone to kick. When funding cuts were made to our department, you could see the attitude from staff to the students become harsher. With the funding criteria more and more difficult to meet, students’ difficulties and struggles in life were treated less and less sympathetically. Instead of being seen as a group of people that needed an education and support, they began to be seen as deficient and as the cause for our loss in funding. The result of this was more students being kicked off courses for ‘bad-attendance’, when most of the time students weren’t able to attend a class due to things like caring responsibilities, health issues or travelling for a parents’ funeral, which were more likely to affect the communities that make up FE.

Working in the Sector

At my FE college, I was working on what was called an hourly paid lecturer (HPL) contract, which is basically a zero-hours contract. Around 35% of the teaching staff at the college were on these contracts, and we got paid approximately £5000 less a year than permanent staff for doing the same amount of work. This is because we were not paid during the college holidays, and we could have our hours reduced with no prior warning. For each new academic year, the permanent teachers were timetabled first. Those of us on hourly paid contracts then received our timetables, made up of everything that was left over. This meant we ended up with a patched-up timetable: you might be teaching from 9.30 to 11.30am, and then again from 6 to 9pm, for example. There were some minimum standards for how permanent teachers could be timetabled, but for precarious staff anything went. The two different contracts had a lot of small differences that added up to a lot of injustice over time. For example, for permanent staff, the employer would pay the full course fees for work related study - further teaching qualifications and so on - but not for staff on zero-hour contracts. As it was necessary to do a lot of cover teaching to get enough paid hours, as well as to take over courses if a teacher left, we were often teaching unfamiliar material.

Along with these real, material issues, there was a tangible feeling of being part of a ‘second class’ while on these contracts. You weren’t seen by the employer as an equal part of the team - you were expendable. This attitude also carried over into the union too.

Workers, Cuts and the Union

In our FE college, my union was the University and College Union (UCU). While the UCU only organises workers in specific roles in FE, rather than all the workers in the sector, membership was still open for more than just FE teachers. All FE workers who work directly with students are eligible to join UCU. This includes classroom assistants and support workers, who can be a substantial part of the workforce in FE colleges: often there are specialist departments for students with learning difficulties, literacy problems and disabilities. In inner city London, classroom assistants are predominantly from ethnic minority backgrounds and the work tends to be more physically demanding. In my college, there was a negative attitude towards these workers being in the union from some of the other union members. This went as far as some UCU reps telling support workers that they could not join our union when they asked.

With increased austerity, working conditions were progressively getting worse.There was more pressure to get specific measurable outcomes, and thus less time for students to learn things that were actually useful. To make matters worse, the workload increased, with fewer workers expected to do the same amount of work as before.

At the same time, redundancies were run continually for several years and the union reps had to be, not only, organising the resistance to them, by means such as strikes, but also putting in an effort to support people who were in severe distress due to fears of losing their jobs. Throughout all this, our reps themselves were also at a risk of being made redundant. This made it an emotionally difficult time for a lot of people. Our college had intermittent strikes against redundancies throughout this period, but some other FE colleges had even more brutal restructures with massive job losses leading to all out strikes in them for several weeks.

Part of the government’s reasoning for making such severe cuts to FE was that employers at that time were not having difficulty recruiting staff with the skills we trained, and therefore the government did not feel the need to spend money on skills training. This is an approach akin to not putting oil in your car because it’s running ok so far. Looking at the current staffing crisis in the NHS, I often remember when our employer wanted to close Access to Nursing, a popular and successful course with a waiting list of many hopeful students. The perspective that was considered important was always whether the employers were able to get staff, and never all the wider benefits of adult education to the community.

My union branch was pretty militant and had a good culture of taking action. We had several strikes and many other times we threatened strike action which got management to back off on one thing or another. However, very little helped against the fact that the funding was cut by 40% and remained that way. If you provide an important service but the government has decided they don’t really care if this service exists anymore and therefore won’t fund it, what do you do as the workers? How do you fight that? The immediate battle was always with our employer, but our employer, although bad, wasn’t ultimately making many of the decisions. Under Britain’s restrictive anti-trade union laws, you can’t strike against political decisions, you can only strike in a conflict with your employer. We didn’t have a way, as one college, to force the government to change its policies. What you can do depends on the wider community response to the crisis, not just on your own actions as workers. My branch was good at joining any local anti-cuts activity, organising several community focused demonstrations and meetings. In many ways I feel like we did everything we could realistically do.

Becoming a Union Rep

After ten years of working as a teacher in further education I got elected as HPL rep, when my UCU branch decided that we should have a specific representative for casualised workers. My work as a rep involved representing workers in disciplinaries and redundancy rounds, organising strikes, and sorting out issues for members. Our college management had an attitude about not letting staff on the casualised contract have time off for union activities, even for elected roles, so it was difficult for me to access union training and wider structures. FE was my first ‘professional’ job. Prior to that I had worked in childcare, retail, catering, and cleaning. This contributed to me often feeling inadequate and anxious about doing my job properly. This didn’t help when I had difficulties with being the union rep, as I often felt inadequate about that too.

In our branch at that time, there were twelve elected people on the branch committee, and often only one would be on a casualised contract. This was despite the fact, as I mentioned above, that we were 35% of the workforce. There were often no classroom assistants or student support workers on the committee due to the negative attitudes in the union towards including these workers. There were other reps in the union who did not agree with the bad attitude some union members had to classroom assistants and student support workers, and wanted to organise with them. Together, we started reaching out to the classroom assistants, which was difficult at first, but we gradually built-up trust with them and soon we had a better relationship.

We discovered in the middle of one dispute that there was a lot of mistreatment going on by managers towards black workers, which the union had not been aware of. This was taken seriously by the branch and these workers were supported by the union to challenge this mistreatment. This led to more workers joining the strike and coming to the picket lines: I remember during one strike, these workers turning up at the picket and people cheering.

Fighting Casualisation and Sexual Harassment

A long running struggle over the casualised contracts had been going on and off for years already, before I even started at the college. What made this affair so complicated was that a lot of these workers were part-time and had jobs in other workplaces - as did I - so this organising involved me coming in before or after my working day elsewhere to look for these casualised workers and talk to them. We started holding regular meetings of the precarious staff and drew up demands. We wanted a pathway to being put on permanent contracts, which should be formally written down, so that managers couldn’t just pick favourites when timetabling. We wanted minimum guaranteed hours and to be included in formal redundancy procedures, not to just lose hours with no process.

I was finding my feet as a new rep and getting into our campaign for casualised staff when two things happened: first, our employer threatened to lay off loads of the casualised staff, including me; and second, I started getting sexually harassed by one of the older union reps. I don’t think these two things happening at the same time was a coincidence. I researched into this, and found workers are more likely to be sexually harassed if they are on precarious contracts.¹ I was in a vulnerable situation both because my employer was threatening to remove my post and because I was pushing the branch to take this issue more seriously and not ignore the college’s casualised staff.

The sexual harassment I was subjected to badly damaged my confidence. I had less belief in my own abilities to do the right thing, and I was also stressed when I had to be in the same space as my harasser - we worked in the same department, so that was a lot of the time. The issue with threatened redundancies meant I was also facing losing my job, and the lack of union focus on casualised workers meant I had to take initiative in the campaign against that. Within the place where I should have felt supported - the union - I was instead being harassed. It was made even more difficult by the fact as I was demanding that the permanent staff treat the threat to precarious staff as seriously as they would treat a threat to their own jobs and ballot for strike action, which many union reps were not happy about. Once somebody even said in a union meeting that ‘the college does need some disposable workers.’ Having to argue with people about taking action when I was in the middle of a crisis of confidence was very difficult.

Eventually I told another union rep and she spoke to the harassing colleague and scared the life out of him. The next day at work I could see he was terrified when he saw me. Ever since, I have had no more trouble from him. But I was left in that situation for far too long before that without support from the union, and it had a harmful effect on me.

Unfortunately, the college did not get rid of casualised contracts, though the position of workers as they moved onto the permanent contracts was improved a lot thanks to union action. Finally the branch voted for strike action over the treatment of precarious workers, and then eventually put demands about the casualised staffs’ contracts into the negotiations when we were actually on strike over something else. We then really dug in our heels until we got it. Now, thanks to this, when people do move from the casualised to the permanent contract, their pay and conditions are much better.

The Future of Organising

I have written quite a negative account here. We did a lot of good things that I’m proud of. Around the time I left the college, casualised and support staff were now fully seen as part of the union and joining in with strikes. We got people some life changing pay rises, and we had incorporated joint action with the community into our normal disputes practice. Unfortunately, the continuing lack of funding had caused another round of cuts to education in our borough. Because of further job losses and management’s attitude, victimisation of the union has got worse. The struggles we undertook were in very adverse conditions and there were real personal hardships involved in both our wins and losses.
Part of the challenge of organising in FE is that in many jobs it is very difficult to have much power on the job. In some workplaces workers have a lot of power due to the nature of their work, such as tube workers, bin workers, or anyone whose withdrawal of labour stops other people working. But many other workers don’t have that power and have to rely on a broader mobilisation happening alongside workplace action. This community mobilisation has happened since the financial crash of 2008, but very patchily.

It has come to light recently that sexual harassment is a widespread issue in unions, so this was not just an unfortunate experience of mine. People who are sexually harassed are often in a position of disadvantage to the harasser. They are younger, or precarious, or lower in some hierarchy, which the harasser then takes advantage of. The unions need a strong response not just to harassment in the workplaces but to improving their own structures and practices. This is a difficult conversation to have, but I want to point out that there were two important political issues here. Firstly, that sexual harassment is just wrong, full stop. Secondly, it also makes other aspects of organising harder. I have been frustrated at the way some of my left wing and trade union comrades have failed to understand these realities, instead often acting as if feminism is just a niche issue or a distraction from the real work of class politics and trade unionism.

The lessons here are not just for those working in FE, but for everyone in the labour movement. Unions need to be not only focused on what they see as the ‘core’ workforce, but also pay attention to lower paid and more marginalised or precarious workers. A lot of the ‘business-as-usual’ way unions do things exclude those workers, sometimes not on purpose. If you would like those workers to be involved but they ‘don’t turn up to meetings’ then you probably need to do something different. Involving these workers is more effort but it makes the activities of the branch so much more real and meaningful. It is definitely worth it, as so many workers now are in more precarious situations. If the union movement doesn’t work in a way to involve them then it won’t win for anybody.