Trade unionism for England’s classroom teachers: the individual-collective division of responses to New Public Management’s decollectivisation of industrial relations

Abstract

This dissertation explores teacher unions’ responses to decollectivisation and disaggregation generated through New Public Management in England’s schools. The research took place in a densely unionised public sector context with competitive multiunionism and fractured traditional collective bargaining. Decollectivisation and disaggregation are conceptualised as interwoven processes undermining trade unions’ capacity to develop or deploy countervailing collective power resources to neoliberal marketisation of education. Structural changes within the sector include academisation and the individualisation of rights at work. An overarching state project of reverse juridification multiplies individualised employment rights to deliver labour market flexibilities, and minimises, limits, or revokes collective employment rights to deliver labour market equity. Applying labour process theory in relation to the degradation via managerialism and performativity of teachers’ work, and actor-centred institutional theory to the broader political economy, the research applies lenses from the critical industrial relations perspective and radical legal research, adding the construct of trade union collective memory as a potential collective power resource. Through twenty-two semi-structured interviews with NASUWT and NEU respondents analysed thematically, their perceptions on how individual-collective division of issues occurs as they arise were interrogated. The study found the unions faced considerable decollectivising challenges. Foremost was misalignment of trade union and employer structures leading to a form of “workplace blindness” allied to a default individualisation of issue-handling. Contra that specific recollectivising tactics and evidence of novel legal mobilisation framed in terms of the right to justice for all teachers were found. The thesis contributes to knowledge of the challenges for and responses of workers and their unions in an under-researched sector at a time of conflict with the state and of change within the two unions involved