AT FIRST sight it seems that National Union of Teachers leader Doug McAvoy was using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
His immense £200,000 propaganda blitz, aimed at persuading teachers to vote 'no' in their ballot on industrial action, was aimed not at staving off a general strike, but a one-day protest stoppage to show support for the campaigns of parents, governors and students fighting cuts in school funding and increases in class sizes.
But though he clearly rejects any notion of action to defend jobs or services, McAvoy was also playing for much bigger stakes: he wants to impose new mechanisms to control the union, to prevent it playing any part in the inevitable clashes with an incoming Labour government.
Barely had the results of the ballot been declared than McAvoy was rushing to the media to announce a unilateral change of policy, dropping the NUT's opposition to opted out Grant Maintained (GM) schools.
Questionnaire
The basis of this new twist, which reverses conference policy and had not even been discussed by the union's right wing dominated Executive, was a bizarre questionnaire "poll' of "the perceptions of NUT representatives in 211 grant maintained schools -about 20 percent of all such schools."
Just six percent of schools are grant maintained, and the NUT polled only one in five of them. Teachers in the 94 percent of LEA-run schools which have lost out as a result of the opt-out schemes were given no voice in the survey.
But McAvoy also had to ignore many of the findings even in this extraordinarily unrepresentative survey in order to claim that members on the ground favoured a change of policy.
In fact the survey showed three quarters of NUT reps working in the GM schools declared themselves opposed to the general principle of opting out. 80 percent reported an increase in bureaucracy in GM schools. The vast majority reported that management style in the GM schools was either little changed or more top-down than before opting out. A substantial majority reported that their GM schools were now "preoccupied with financial management at the expense of educational issues".
Perverted
It takes the perverted genius of a McAvoy to translate these findings into any kind of argument for accepting school opt-outs: the whole process illustrates the scope for misleading members and the wider public by asking only selective and biased questions of an unrepresentative and arbitrary layer in the But this is the direction in which McAvoy and other right wingers now wish to travel.
A resolution raised by McAvoy's hand-raisers on the NUT Executive has given him carte blanche to attack the policy-making role of a supposedly unrepresentative conference, and "Prepare a report, with recommendations, to ensure that mainstream views prevail in the future in the creation and implementation of Union policies and actions".
Resting on the laurels of his ballot victory, McAvoy is likely to look towards more policy-making by survey, and more ballots to override the considered views of the activists who are vital to the life and strength of the union.
Uninformed
This increasing technique of procuring right wing majorities by balloting the uninformed did wonders for Tony Blair in the Clause Four fight, and is becoming increasingly popular among union leaders. Alan Johnson, chief of the Communications Workers Union also used the same method to overturn the existing policy of both merged unions.
These right wingers have rediscovered what the witch-hunting TGWU leadership discovered 20 years ago in their attacks on the Trotskyist-led shop stewards movement in British Leyland's Cowley assembly plant: a mass membership ballot gives the employers and right wing media maximum impact on the result.
Thatcher knew it too: that's why the Tory anti-union laws have tried to impose on decision-making by postal ballot rather than allowing votes by mass meetings where the issues are explained and discussed by those taking part.
Of course it sounds more democratic to give every member a vote on every key issue: but the reality is that this leaves all the real control in the hands of a few national officials, who would decide not only which questions should be put out to a ballot, but also how the question should be framed.
Unions - and Labour Parties - require a broad base of membership, and offer every member the right to participate. But they depend on the commitment ano aenyisast a relatively small minority of lay members.
Unions in particular are not just a coalition of equal individuals: a vital few volunteer to devote their time and energy to building and administering local branches; stewards and reps put their jobs on the line to press the case of other members, negotiating on their behalf with often hostile management.
Some sacrifice leisure time to familiarise themselves with wider issues affecting the union, and are elected to represent branches and regions at conferences, where issues are debated and policies decided.
This active, committed layer is what sustains unions through hard periods like the present: at times when big disputes or mass struggles erupt, many of the more passive layers of members may also come into activity, broadening the base.
Union bureaucrats like McAvoy, on £60,000 a year plus an expense allowance higher than most teachers' salaries, do not see themselves as part of the active layer: they are not involved in the nitty gritty branch-level The unions depend on an active minority to organise each branch and negotiate with management fight against cuts. They are of the way in which ninenot concerned with the prob- teenth century French dictator lems of their members; they Louis Bonaparte posed as a are concerned only to do deals figure 'above class, balanced with Tony Blair that guaran- between the power of the tee them a quiet life. military and the apparent supSubscriptions port or te electorate, seems to offer McAvoy and co a hope of achieving this.
Their ideal would be a unBut McAvoy's bonapartist ion in which members pay subscriptions, but ask for experiment may be short-lived. nothing in return. Outside the vicious, paranoid The turn to a form of rule circles of NUT Head Office, by referendum', reminiscent parents, governors, students and thousands of ordinary teachers are fighting back.
GM schools may be favoured by McAvoy, Blunkett and Blair, but they are rejected not only by the left but by the overwhelming majority of parents - and by the other teaching unions.
Against the cynical manoeuvres, rigged referenda and reactionary propaganda of the right wing, the best answer is hard facts - and agitation against the Tory onslaught.