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The 55,000 strong Educational Institute of Scotland opens its 1977 AGM in Stirling on June 2nd in the midst of the rank and file revolt against the Social Contract. As at Heathrow and Leyland, the battle against incomes policy will be a battle for union democracy.
This confrontation is not new to EIS. In December 1975, an emergency conference instructed EIS to frame a salary claim within the C6 limit. This tacit acceptance of the Social Contract was motivated by General Secretary John Pollock as a pragmatic acknowledgement of EIS lack of industrial strength, Yet following the conference Pollock, a former chairman of the Labour
Party in Scotland, was quoted in the press as saying Scottish teachers had pledged overwhelming backing to Labour's Social Contract.
Motions for the 1977 AGM indicate a pay
revolt is brewing in EIS. A motion from Aberdeen declares "total opposition to the Social Contract" and calls on EIS "to campaign within the STUC against the Social Contract". A motion from Renfrew calls for a return to free collective bargaining at the end of Phase IT.
The unrest, however, is contradictory. Many EIS members are still confused into believing an end to some form of incomes policy means a return to the hungry Sixties when, as they see it, a "lack of industrial strength" (more correctly, the lack of a leadership which could forge a public sector alliance) led to declining living standards.
This does not mean that teachers support their living standards being reduced. A motion from Central Region calls for *The establishment of salary scales which would restore, in real terms, the salaries of teachers to those prevailing as at August 1975, a contract-busting 50% increase!
Should this pay revolt boil over at the AGM, it would require a vigorous confrontation with Pollock to get main union policy implemented. In 1975, EIS voted for an immediate ban on mixed age, mixed subject composite classes over 25, and no
coverage of classes for teachers absent more
than three days.
The AGM will be a three-comered tight between Pollock, the headmasters, and the left. There is no love lost between Pollock, bent on turning ElS into a white collar union with political influence, and the headmasters who are integrated into Scottish Office machinery. Pollock is always capable of a left face, and will certainly support an Aberdeen call for affiliation to the TUC, which the headmasters rejected on Council as "proletarianising" EIS. The urgent task for EIS fragmented left is to unite and lead the growing pay revolt against the Social Contract and the
present leadership.