• Listen to this segment

GUEST: Christine Blower, Acting General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers

British teachers took to the streets by the tens of thousands demanding fair pay last Thursday in the country’s first national strike in more than twenty years. The National Union of Teachers, with a membership of 200,000, was joined in solidarity by lecturers and other public sector workers as it mobilized its members in response to salary negotiations that they feel are unfair and amount to a pay cut. In January of this year, the British government offered a 2.45 percent raise which the union rejected on the grounds of not being adequate enough to keep up with rates of inflation. Instead, Europe’s largest teachers union is demanding that wages be raised by 4.1 percent or the government could face more strikes in the future. They say that the raises offered are not only inadequate, but also will discourage new teachers saddled with debt from entering the profession. Last week’s one-day work stoppage kept more than an estimated one million children home from the nearly 8,000 schools affected.