On Tuesday, the government took the unusual step of ending the teachers’ strike through a compulsory wage board. The decision will be met with disappointment, disbelief, noise and discontent in the country’s teachers’ rooms. A clearly affected Steffen Handal, head of the Education Association, called this a dark day. “You don’t build trust with coercion, you don’t solve the teacher shortage with a forced salary board”, was his message. An Ap-led government knows this very well, and that is why the decision was also long overdue. The right to strike is almost sacrosanct, the teachers are a group they want to keep inside and they are reluctant to deprive the parties of the responsibility to come to an agreement themselves. Toxic cocktail When Labor Minister Marte Mjøs Persen (Ap) nevertheless had to swallow the toxic cocktail, it was because the government could no longer accept that Norwegian schoolchildren were about to lose another school year. The corona generation already has large professional and social gaps. Now many risked going into the autumn holidays without having had a single normal school day. It has made such a strong impression that even Jonas Gahr Støre has become unusually involved in the strike for a prime minister to be. Will be criticized The rationale for the compulsory wage board is intuitively easy to understand, but nevertheless unusual. It is not a classic conflict where life and health are at risk. On the other hand, a so-called holistic assessment has been made, the conclusion of which is that the strike has serious social consequences for children and young people, not least for the vulnerable pupils. This is a rationale we would hardly have seen if we had not just been through a pandemic. It will be scrutinized by the teachers. They can also complain to the authorities to the ILO, which is the UN’s organization for working life. The government will also be accused of eroding the right to strike. Especially from the left, they can expect massive criticism. Anger and disappointment The teachers wanted the government to intervene, but not in this way. They wanted money, not a forced wage board. The hope was that the government would somehow instruct the municipalities’ employers’ organization KS to prioritize teachers, or put new, fresh money on the table. Now the government has to live with the fact that they have disappointed even more ordinary people. Specifically, 190,000 teachers. With an average salary of NOK 620,000 for an assistant professor with supplements, they fall well within the government’s definition of who can call themselves “ordinary”. A Gordian knot The teachers’ strike was in many ways unsolvable. There was only one thing the teachers could accept: More money on the table. And that was about the only thing KS couldn’t give them. That would break too much with the collective wage structure. 37 other trade unions have already accepted this year’s wage settlement. If the teachers got more, you risked moving back to the beginning. Nor could they agree to promise the teachers more of next year’s pot. The head of negotiations in KS, Tor Arne Gangsø, compares it to being invited to a dinner party, and then three people have eaten the dinner before you arrive. It was not made easier by the fact that the municipalities are also entering a time of tighter finances. Didn’t help with buns When Education Minister Tonje Brenna (Ap) practically ordered the parties back to the negotiating table last weekend, few believed in any solution. Nevertheless, the parties sat together with national mediator Mats Ruland for two days to the end. Neither a whip, a carrot nor a bag of buns that the national mediator had bought helped. If nothing else, the weekend job highlighted how stuck it was. And that was a contributing factor to why the government went in for a compulsory wage board. It is already the longest teacher strike of all time, and even if it continued for another 12 weeks, few believed that the main picture would change. It is being referred to as a strike without an exit strategy, where the Swedish Education Association in particular has painted itself into a corner. The vilified counterpart has a lot of support Although many people sympathize with the teachers’ pay fight, they have had less support in this conflict than they wanted. Much is about timing, which many believe is very poor. In addition, the teachers have made the employers’ association KS a kind of scapegoat. The use of words, especially between the Education Association and KS, has come across as irreconcilable and sometimes disrespectful. But the teachers forget that KS is nothing more than the sum of municipalities and county councils. And there has not been a queue of mayors and local politicians who have demanded that the teachers be accommodated. On the contrary, KS has broad back coverage, not least far into LO. Their mantra of lifting the whole team is in conflict with the Education Association’s demand to lift the teachers. Not many inches below the surface, strong antagonisms between the two unions are bubbling and threatening to come to light. No problems solved The person who gets the heaviest job is Minister of Education Tonje Brenna. She must stop the rage in the teachers’ rooms and restore the confidence of the teachers. For the compulsory salary board only solves the acute challenge in the school. If nothing happens, the strike will only repeat itself at the next crossroads – with greater force and an even higher level of frustration. Sugaring the pill The question is whether there are any obvious solutions that can improve the mood in the longer term. Because the teachers’ organizations ooze with distrust. That thought must have struck the relatively new minister of knowledge, who is really being put to the test. The teachers primarily want a kind of teacher’s package, with a binding plan to step up the salary. They justify this with, among other things, the recruitment challenges and high turnover in the teaching profession. But for the municipalities, it will probably be an even greater challenge to recruit health personnel in the future. One proposal that has been discussed is to make teachers a separate tariff area. In this way, one can avoid the pedagogically demanding exercise of pitting teachers against nurses and other important professional groups. KS is skeptical, but may come to accept this after a more thorough investigation. Conflict in the teacher’s room Another proposal that has been on the table has been to narrow down the requirements for who can call themselves a teacher. For Utdanningsforbundet, it is a requirement that teachers must be qualified teachers. Here there are intersecting interests between the teacher groups. Many vocational teachers, many of whom are organized in LO, have a different background and expertise. KS also wants flexibility for who can teach in the school. But there is only one thing that can appease the teachers now: More pay. And if there’s one thing the government has prepared us for, it’s that money won’t rain from the sky anytime soon. And they are getting quite used to disappointing ordinary people.
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Now she has to appease 190,000 furious teachers – Statement
