The teacher unions need a lesson in humility... and when to shut up

AT the first whiff of a bonus payment for frontline workers who went above and beyond the call of duty during the pandemic, no prizes for guessing which group was quickest to belly up to the trough. Not the retail staff who kept the supermarkets open through the worst of times, not the hospital porters or nurses or other medical personnel who literally risked their lives to do their jobs on a daily basis, and even though gardaí often took dog’s abuse while implementing Covid restrictions, their union, the GRA, has reportedly said its members should get ‘no more and no less’ than any other State employees.

No, the group which made the most ‘extraordinary efforts’ during the pandemic, it seems, were the country’s teachers, and their unions promptly came together to issue a joint statement looking for a serious slice of the pie.

‘We would expect,’ the heads of the ASTI, the INTO and the TUI declared with one voice, ‘to be included in any discussions around the acknowledgement of workers’ contributions during the pandemic.’

It was the dedication of their members, apparently, which ‘allowed schools to continue to prioritise teaching and learning while meeting chilI dren/young people’s needs’.

This will have come as news to those parents who homeschooled their children, often while trying to work from home themselves, for endless months during the pandemic. It’ll be a surprise to those who recall how the secondary teachers’ union effectively called an illegal strike, last January, and defied a Government instruction to return to their classrooms for three days a week to teach Leaving Cert students.

It will hardly have gone down well with the parents of special-needs pupils, for example, whose schools remained closed while specialneeds schools stayed open all over Europe.

And it’ll certainly astonish those who remember those same unions threatening to go on strike if they didn’t get the Covid vaccine ahead of elderly and vulnerable people. If this was the teachers’ unions’ definition of ‘extraordinary effort’, would hate to see them be mildly uncooperative or, God forbid, self-serving.

As it happens, though, this time the rest of us aren’t the only ones dismayed by the attitude of the teachers’ unions. This time it was the teachers themselves, those ordinary, hard-working, committed professionals we all know and respect, who were first to call out this behaviour for the shameful, grasping nonsense it is.

‘Who asked our union to look for a bonus pandemic payment? How many emails and texts? I haven’t heard of even one member,’ commented one angry teacher. ‘What on Earth is going on here?’

They went on social media and called into radio shows to distance themselves from their militant leaders.

Limerick ASTI rep Eric Nelligan told Newstalk that he had absolutely no idea where the demand had come from, and that he and his teacher friends agreed they would be ‘embarrassed to put ourselves on the same pedestal, in the same reward category, as health service workers’.

Teachers are hardly the most popular people in the country as it stands, he said, with the public divided ‘50-50’ in terms of attitudes to the profession, so this demand was guaranteed ‘a terrible response’. He added: ‘The fact that they even put the call out there – how did the heads of the unions not see that this would go down like a lead balloon?’

Another school principal echoed his indignation: ‘I have not heard a single solitary teacher or school leader colleague even suggest it. This takes the biscuit.’

And indeed it seems the three unions didn’t consult their members before elbowing their way to the front of the queue – they’ve admitted that no formal discussions had preceded their demand to be included in any negotiations about a pandemic bonus. Speaking to friends and relatives who are teachers, I suspect this is not the first time that the unions have failed to represent their members’ views, and even caused them embarrassment. None I knew would defend that strike threat over the vaccine, for example, and some were too ashamed to discuss it.

How sad, really, to hear a teacher, whose forerunners in the profession would have been the most respected and esteemed pillars of their communities, concede that they are now disliked by half the population. And let’s be clear – that loss of status is not down to the behaviour of individual teachers.

It’s entirely the fault of those unions whose first instinct, as one social media post put it, is ‘grab, grab, grab’ at every opportunity. Now that they’ve finally found their voice, and called out their unions for antics that do them no credit, let’s hope that the teachers continue to use it and truly speak for themselves.