SUE BLAINE, Business Day, 12 February 2010

THE Democratic Alliance’s (DA’s) call for teaching to be declared an essential service, thus banning teachers from striking, was misinformed and shortsighted, teachers’ trade unions said yesterday.The DA was undeterred and was to submit its application to the Essential Service Committee today , DA basic education spokeswoman Junita Kloppers- Lourens said yesterday.

SA’s largest teachers’ union, the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu), said the DA’s call was based on a “superficial” reading of statistics released by Tokiso Dispute Settlement Services, SA’s largest private dispute resolution provider. One of the country’s three most prominent unions, the Suid-Afrikaanse Onderwysersunie (SAOU), said it was shortsighted.

“The statement sounds wonderful on the ear, but it does not take cognisance of the realities facing education. By declaring education as an essential service, the real hurdles facing education will not be addressed whatsoever,” said SAOU general secretary and CEO Chris Klopper.
The second-largest teachers’ union, the National Professional Teachers Organisation of SA (Naptosa), did not want to comment before understanding properly what the party meant, but Naptosa president Ezra Ramasehla said the union was “not going to give them a call” to ask for an explanation because the DA’s suggestion “sounds like a knee-jerk response”. Tokiso CEO Tanya Venter said while the statistical report, which tracks labour action in SA between 1995 and 2009, did show that Sadtu had been responsible for 42% of worker days lost in the 14-year period, the statistic had not been quoted in the context, as it should have been, of 2007’s month-long public service strike.

“(The 2007 strike was) the largest in SA’s history by the public sector, of which Sadtu was the largest participating union. Between 1995 and 2009, the number of work-days lost to strikes per annum was on average between 1- and 2-million, however in 2007, this trend line spiked to 13-million workdays lost.... The majority of work- days lost that are attributed to Sadtu fall within the 2007 strike. Indeed, this is confirmed by the Tokiso Review statistic on the number of strikes (as opposed to working days lost) over the 1995 to 2009 period, where only 2% of strikes fell within the health and education sectors,” she said.
Sadtu said that the “bargaining regime” in SA’s education sector had an effect on the statistics, too. There was only one employer, but when there was a dispute the entire workforce of nearly 400000 public school teachers could potentially “down chalk”.Klopper said many of the “ailments” in public schools would not be solved by banning teachers from striking.

He described these as: a lack of in-service training to improve teachers’ teaching skills and subject knowledge; teacher absenteeism and low morale; curriculum problems; poorly disciplined pupils; and “departmental officials who are not able to administrate the various departments of education”.

Sadtu, Naptosa and the SAOU made a public commitment last month to “dedicated professionalism and the development of a true culture of learning, teaching and discipline in public schools”, for teachers and pupils, and warned it would take between six and 12 years to improve SA’s public school system properly.