Put your money where your mouth is

Here's a radical new idea for how the ASTI should pursue its claim for a 30 per cent pay rise: go on strike. Those who imagine that the ASTI is already on strike should look more closely at the nature of its campaign. In reality, what has created the grotesque prospect of students having to confront their own teachers' pickets in order to sit their exams is the ASTI's extreme reluctance to behave like a normal trade union and engage in proper strike action.

A real honest-to-God strike is both effective and equitable. Effective because it shuts down the workplace and brings a dispute to a head. Equitable because those who dish out the pain also take it. By foregoing their wages, striking workers provide a real answer to those who say: "Look at the hardship you're causing." They can then look the objector in the eye and say: "Yes, but look at the hardship we're enduring." The strikers retain the moral dignity of being prepared to suffer for a cause.

The ASTI's campaign, by contrast, has been driven above all by a desire to insulate teachers from the financial consequences of their own actions. The key question that seems to have been asked is not how do we bring this dispute to a head, but how do we carry on this dispute at the least personal cost to ourselves? Like air-conditioned tourists, they want a free ride across the rocky terrain of industrial struggle.

Thus, bizarrely, the ASTI's primary battleground has not been the actual work that teachers are employed to do - teaching in the classroom. The series of rolling one-day strikes, scheduled to avoid holidays like Christmas and Saint Patrick's Day, is as minimal as it could possibly be. The two areas that have borne the brunt of the campaign - supervision and exams - are, for the vast majority of teachers, voluntary activities.

The Government undoubtedly mishandled the supervision issue by unlawfully using the salary check-off system to target ASTI members and stop their pay for the days when schools were closed. But the outrage of teachers at the very notion that their industrial action might have financial consequences was nonetheless revealing. The clear message was that they want the gain without the pain.

The cynicism of that tactic may have been tempered somewhat by its cleverness, but the targeting of the exams ups the ante so much that it places the self-respect of the teaching profession itself on the table.

Essentially, the ASTI is using exam students as the shield behind which it can protect its own members' salaries from the consequences of a proper strike. In the Alice in Wonderland logic that seems to have taken hold within the union, the nuclear option of mutually-assured destruction is preferable to conventional, and relatively honourable warfare of a good old-fashioned strike. That something strange has happened to the collective thought-processes of the ASTI is clear to anyone with a medium-term memory. This time last year, when it was reported that an internal ASTI strategy document suggested that the option of targeting the exams was being considered, the union reacted with all the outrage of an innocent person accused of a vile crime. The furious denials at that time suggested that the overwhelming instinct of most teachers was that sabotaging the exams would be shameful.

Likewise, the press statement issued by ASTI general secretary Charlie Lennon at the start of last year's exams now makes surreal reading. He advised students taking exams to relax and remain positive during the exams period. While we know that exams can be a source of stress and worry, it is important to remain calm and keep things in perspective. Will the ASTI be issuing this fatherly advice again next June?

The ASTI's distortion of its own better instincts is due entirely to its concern to avoid a traditional strike. Why this extreme reluctance to do what workers have always done when negotiations are not giving them what they want? The obvious explanation is that its members' main concern is to limit the damage to their own salary cheques.

This is borne out by the strange contradiction highlighted by the Labour Court. To be consistent with its demand to be treated as a union outside of the ICTU and of the partnership process, the ASTI should have refused to accept the increases awarded under the PPF. In discussions with the ASTI, the court was unable to get a satisfactory explanation as to why these payments were being made or accepted, given that ASTI members are outside the PPF. The missing explanation is presumably rather simple: the union's principled objections to the PPF don't extend as far as the bottom line of take-home pay.

If there is an element of plain cowardice in this, it is mixed with a dash of confusion. To have the courage of your convictions, you need to have strong convictions in the first place. Yet the ASTI sometimes seems unconvinced of key parts of its own case. Who, for example, has claimed that the changes in post-primary education in Ireland in recent years have made Irish teachers and the Irish education system the envy of many other countries. Michael Woods? Some smug right-wing economist? Actually, the ASTI itself, in last year's "Teachers teach more than you know" PR campaign.