Haringey's cash crisis has been blamed, by the Labour group leading the council, on the influx of Turkish Kurds into the borough in the last two years.
This comes at the time when Haringey is making sweeping cuts in services, riding roughshod over thousands of council workers in the process. The most serious cuts have come in the education sector. The council is spending £11 million less than the figure recommended by the Tories for 1991/92.
The practice of Haringey council 506377, Southampton: Paul 0703 is more akin to an employer in the nineteenth century or Rolls Royce than what people might expect of a so-called socialist borough. One letters were hand-delivered to hundreds of school cleaners telling them to do 30 per cent more work for no extra money: Those who refused to cooperate were promptly sacked.
Secondary schools have been worst hit in the latest round of cuts. Four schools are to lose 30 to 40 teachers. In one school almost ten per cent of the staff will be lost. These job losses cause a further deterioration in working conditions and in the school curriculum.
As if this wasn't enough, almost the entire team of education advisors and inspectors has been cut. The education office has lost so many staff thạt it will be hard-pushed to even implement the cuts!
Haringey's school meals - once the council's pride and joy - are to be reduced to sandwiches and frozen hamburgers. Eighty dinner ladies have already lost their jobs, and 30 lunchtime supervisors are about to lose theirs' without any redundancy pay. The lunchtime supervisors have just started an indefinite strike with backing from NUPE.
Despite summer-term demoralisation, the mood of Haringey teachers is increasingly militant. In a recent ballot NUT members voted 7 to 1 in favour of a three-day strike. Under this threat, subsequent negotiations pushed the council into withdrawing compuisory redundancies and promising to safeguard local class sizes and cover agree ments.
Haringey council has made no protest to central goverment over the current cash crisis caused by the Poll Tax. In blaming Kurdish people the council's Labour leadership is giving a green light to any fascist in the borough. Instead of fighting the Tories on the cuts and the Poll Tax, all they are saying is that their antiracist policy is also a dispensable 'luxury' along with jobs and services in the borough.
Helen Collinson member Haringey NUT