Lessons in Organising: What Trade Unionists Can Learn from the War on Teachers

An excellent review of the attack on teachers and their unions, by authors well placed to point to ways to improve the fight back and resistance’ – Kevin Courtney, Joint General Secretary NEUThe heart of any trade union is its reps and activists organizing in the workplace. After years of membership decline across sectors, a renewed recognition of this essential fact is behind the ’turn to organizing’ in the union movement today.This turn to collective organizing builds strength at a local as well as a national level, and also aids in mobilizing around a wider range of political issues from campaigning against austerity to taking action for the environment. In recent years, this fusion of workplace organizing and national campaigning has been exemplified by Europe’s largest education trade union, the National Education Union (NEU).In Lessons in Organising, the authors bring together activist, academic and union official perspectives to assess the potential (and the limitations) of the ’turn to organizing’ and set out the case for a new transformative trade unionism for the 21st century