Fight the school meals massacre!

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The thought of a 55p, 75p, of £1 school meal in the New Year has angered many parents throughout the country.

If the proposed Tory Law on removing subsidies from school meals goes through Parliament the echool meals system as we know it will disappear.

To cut spending on school meals by £200 million it is proposed to bring in more 'convenience food and cut staffing by 10 to 15 percent. This means 30,000 to 40,000 jobs lost in the service in 1980/1 alone.

Most of these jobs are held by wornen working part-time to fit in with their children and who would in most cases find it impossible to find suitable work elsewhere.

As a prelude to forcing through this Bill an experimental snacks system has been operating in Leicestershire since October 1st. Under this scheme school pupils are no longer offered a school meal but a series of snacks at commercial rates.

Thus a typical 'meal' may be 2 sausages (16p), chips (15p) 1 veg. (8p) and pudding for 15p. Water is not provided at the table and a 1p charge has been made for a beaker of water.

The effects are that either parents are forced to pay a minimum of 50p for an equivalent amount of food but which is substantially inferior to the old school meal or what has happened increasingly in Leicester, pupils opt out of school meals and bring sandwiches.

The new law will provide for local authorities to charge for children eating their sandwiches in the school area as well!

This is the sort of system that in January will be introduced in many areas. By offering an inferior school meal at shop prices, this will effectively cut the demand for school meals to a point where local authorities can legitimately argue that there is no demand and set the scene for them to abolish them completely!

When the experimental scheme was proposed in Leicester there was no direction from the NUPE or NUT leadership to oppose it. In fact, initially NUPE leaders were welcoming the system arguing that it would require more staff!

NUT promised only support for individual teachers who wished to boycott the system, by refusing to take part in lunchtime supervision. Despite the fact that 2 out of 7 schools in the scheme refused to co-operate with it and the demands that have consistently been made by NUT members for the local Executive Committee to lead a fight on this question, they have refused to take any action, insisting that we must concentrate our fight on the question of teacher's jobs.

The officers argue that the cut in school meals and transport are not really cuts in education and that perhaps we ought to accept these cuts so that educational standards don't suffer.

Apart from the well documented evidence of the failure of hungry children at school, cuts in school meals and transport are happening alongside teachers being sacked, class sizes rising, schools closing down and a heavy attack being made on nursery education with no fight being organised by the NUT leadership.

The officers of NUPE have a disgraceful record on the defence of the school meals service which has been systematically run down under both Labour and Tory governments.

They boast of 'no redundancy" agreements with local authorities as staffing is slashed through no replacement and drastic redeployment. Kitchens have been reduced to skeleton staff.

Whenever there is a fall in the number of pupils having school dinners, there is a corresponding drop in wages and staff. NUPE nationally has made no effort to change this basis for wages which results in many women working for hours they're not paid for, as it take the same amount cook food for 40 as it does for 60 or 70.

The NUPE leadership at national and local level scandalously blames the membership for its own •inactivity.

The membership will fight, but they have been kept in isolation and uninformed. They need encouragement and direction from a NUPE leadership that is prepared to really fight using effective weapons. They should encourage widespread strike action throughout the public sector, calling for supporting strike action throughout industry. This is the only way to defend our children's school meals and the women's jobs that provide them.

There is no doubt that if we leave it until the next general election THERE WILL BE NO SCHOOL MEALS LEFT. We have to bring the Tories down, as the miners did in 1974, through strike action.

Canteen staff and teachers must mount a joint campaign to defend school meals linked to opposition to all cuts, rejecting outright any question of priorities. But they will have to fight the leadership all the way to do so.

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EGAEWERKERS Woman Worker, December 1979