Going out on strike

is something I have never done. I don't think anyone in my family or extended family has ever done it either. We are not "militant unionists". We simply haven't had the sort of jobs where we felt strike action was right.

A lot of us have been teachers, doctors or nurses, or self-employed. Perhaps it is a clan thing. I don't know. 

I do know I could have taken two days out in my teaching career - and I made a conscious decision not to take either. Why?

In the first instance I was the school librarian. I saw very little of the staff room. Back then we had libraries in junior schools, libraries with full time librarians. I thought of it as my job to keep the library open through "play time". I snatched a fifteen minute lunch break before the children were free to play. If there was a staff meeting after school I attended it but, apart from that, I saw the teachers when their classes came into the library or they wanted audio-visual materials for lessons.

I must have been doing something right because the library was always crowded, sometimes so crowded I had to say "no more - you can have your turn tomorrow".  It was not something I ever wanted to say. The disappointment on a child's face was not something I ever wanted to face.  I really appreciated it when some of the older children said, "It's all right miss. I've got my book. He can have his turn" or something similar. 

The library was somewhere these children, often from very poor backgrounds with no books at home, liked to be. How could I deny them a school day of no books? They knew all about strikes and they wanted to know, "You will come to school won't you miss?" I went to school. Interestingly the other staff came too. Only one staff member wanted to go out on strike but the rest knew that showing the children how important they were was more important than going on strike. The about-to-be union (it still wasn't a union) people complained but other schools did the same thing. In the end the "strike" was little more than a few more militant teachers making demands that could not be met at the time. No schools closed.

On the second occasion there was a union by then. They wanted teachers to go out. I was working in a special education setting with profoundly disabled children. We didn't even need to make a decision not to go out because to do so would have put children at risk of harm. You cannot simply abandon children in that situation. We knew not all parents could cope if we took a sudden day off. The  parents rallied around us instead.

I would not have gone out even if the other teachers had decided to do so. It is something I gave some thought to, a lot of thought. I came to the conclusion that the answer would have been to donate a day's pay to the school. It could be used towards buying something the school needed if everyone else wanted to go out. 

Right or wrong? I maintain I was right. It seems most of my fellow teachers agreed with me.

Now it seems to be different. There is a strike called for tomorrow. The demands the union is making are, to put it mildly, ridiculous - probably deliberately so. Nobody is going to get a 25% pay rise for less work. Despite that, there are over six hundred schools closing and others staying open with just a few teachers in attendance. 

In many ways I do sympathise with the teachers. Their roles have changed - and not for the better. Yesterday when I was talking to one of the mothers in this street. She was telling me how her parents were taking the two children for the day. Would I go out on strike? She wanted to know. 

I knew my answer would be the same as before. No. The children would have to come first. I would give up a day's pay and donate it for their benefit before I went out and left them.