500 sackings challenge

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In recent months. 'Socialist Press' has repeatedly stressed that national strike action by can be defeated.

The refusal of union leaders to call such action has led to a situation in which 30,000 qualified teachers are unemployed, and those who have jobs are faced with declining working conditions and increasing class sizes.

in some areas local councis, encouraged by the reluctance ol union leaders to fight, are translating Denis Healey's talk of overspending? into the language of direct sackings.

In Oxford, the Tory Council is looking for ways to cut f5 million from an £83 million budget, and wants £3¼ million to come from education.

SACK This involves a threat to sack 500 full time and 233 part-time teachers. The Council only employs 5000 full-time teachers all together!

The Secretary of the Oxford NUT Division, Jack Stedman, has in congratulating himself on having accepted cuts of £1 million in recent years.

He has • led the NUT Division into accepting these cuts, negotiating them and even advising the Council as to which areas to cut, arguing that a) the cuts were necessary to save manufacturing industry and b) the NUT does not have the strength, anyway, to defeat them.

But throughout this period Stedman has felt his members breathing down his neck with increasing heat.

10% CUT Under these circumstances a proposed cut of 10% of total staffing was sufficient to impel even such a pliable bureaucrat up to London last week to plead with the Union's executive to take action.

Since his return there have been rumOurS that the NUT intend to make Oxford, with the Council's "excessive" cuts, into-a "test case"

But such a fight will be a "test case" not only of a Tory Council's resolve in carrying out the demands of the reactionary Labour Government, but also of the local NUT Anfand their members' most basic rights.

The chances of these leaders passing the test are not good. If, in the past, Stedman has displayed so little confidence in the strength of his Union that he dared not fight cuts of £l million, where is he going to find the confidence to fight f3¼ million worth of cuts?

PRINCIPLED

To defend both jobs and free education the working class needs a leadership with a principled record, prepared to mobilise strike action and call on the local trade union and labour movement to back this struggle.

At the same time the demand must be put forward that the full plans, accounts and current expenditure of the Local Education Authority be opened up to elected committees from the teaching and other unions.

On the basis of the information revealed a fight can then be taken up for the protection of education against inflation through a sliding scale of spending, rising in pace with genuinely increased costs. League.

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'ESS, Wedness ay 8th Sep tember 19

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teaching unions is the only way in which education cuts