Roger Seifert

Classroom Struggle? Market Oriented Education Reforms and their Impact on the Teacher Labour Process

The reforms introduced through the Education Reform Act 1988 have brought about a radical redistribution of authority in the school system. The reform process includes the introduction of competitive markets, the erosion of the democratic structures that previously underpinned the state school sector, and the centralization of power over both funding and educational issues. This article examines the impact of these changes on the teacher labour process, drawing from recent research in schools in England and from earlier research on schools in the USA. Teacher labour is being transformed in several ways; reduced autonomy, deskilling, work intensification, and increased labour flexibility are identified. Some consideration is given to teacher responses, noting the importance of trade union responses for this traditionally highly organised group of employees.

Reforming further education: the changing labour process for college lecturers

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to examine how the labour process of further education lecturers has changed as a result of legislative reforms introduced in the early 1990s.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on labour process theory and emergent perspectives on “the new public management” to provide theoretical frameworks. Evidence is derived from research carried out at three FE colleges in the English West Midlands involving interviews with managers and lecturing staff, documentary material and a survey of lecturing staff employed in the colleges.Findings – Market‐based reforms in this sector have resulted in the intensification and extensification of work effort for lecturers. This paper argues that these changes have been driven by the ideological underpinning of the reform process. Individual and collective acts of lecturer resistance have been insufficiently strong to prevent change from occurring and worker alienation has increased.Research limitations/implications – The case s...

Teacher, Lecturer or Labourer? Performance Management Issues in Education.

Education management has increasingly been dominated by the norms and requirements of general management ideologies that focus on performance controls and target achievements. Under this regime, solving the labour problem — relatively low productivity — has taken precedence over all other forms of management. In pursuit of this objective senior managers have employed more and more Taylor-like initiatives, including close supervision of task content and its execution. As a result the professionals have resisted collectively and formally through unions, informally in the common rooms and individually through grievance, absenteeism, increased instrumentalism and dull compliance in the job. The application of tighter controls over performance turns these workers into waged labour, displacing any notions of professional self-regulation and undermining collegial high trust relations and educational autonomy that these professionals might reasonably expect.

The close supervision of further education lecturers: 'You have been weighed, measured and found wanting'

This is an empirically based study of changes in the FE lecturer labour process driven by college managers under pressure from central state targets and funding controls. Two elements of labour management are considered: close observation and professional development. The dialectical dynamic of workplace employment relations is exposed as an endless struggle between managers seeking to degrade the staff through control over task and staff seeking to maintain professional standards to protect themselves and their vision of education. The findings are expressed in the words of the lecturers themselves and reveal the everyday pathology of ever more oppressive workplace labour management in the context of a particular organizational political economy.

Degrading the labourer: The reform of local government manual work

Market mechanisms in the local-government sector have transformed service delivery and the management of manual municipal labour. Low pay has traditionally been tolerated in these services in exchange for job security; and the relative autonomy entailed by non-profit production methods had permitted the continuation of a public-service ethos. But in a labour-intensive sector, the move from democratically determined to market-led production within ever-decreasing levels of central funding is only possible through job loss, work intensification and insecurity. Case study findings show how these pressures were played out in school cleaning and grounds maintenance in a Labour local authority.

Training and collective bargaining in European public services: a study of training‐related issues in French, Finnish and UK health services

It is frequently asserted that there is a link between the nature of training provision within an organization and its success or failure. Within this approach is an assumption that training is simply a neutral tool to be applied to the benefit of all. This article challenges this approach, arguing that training is an issue that may be the subject of disagreement and conflict. Using evidence gained from managers and trade union representatives in health care services in France, Finland and the UK, it is argued that all aspects of training provision are best handled through traditional collective bargaining procedures. This suggests that there is a need to provide training for managers and union representatives to enable them to understand both training issues and collective bargaining procedures.

Management development in the British and Irish Civil Services

Management development has become an important part of the debate over reforms of public services in the UK and Ireland since the early 1980s. The argument was that the crisis of public sector delivery was not one of resources, but of the management of available resources. Thus management became the central focus of restructuring. The emphasis on the central role of management meant the reformulation of old ideas around notions of new public management and human resource management. Failure to treat the management development of managers according to the tenets of HRM may indicate both practical mistakes associated with implementation and/or deep seated misconceptions in the relevance of management reform to the wider reform of public services. Our evidence, taken from samples of UK and Irish Civil Service managers, shows a more subtle set of failings associated both with traditional aspects of Civil Service management and with problems in the new systems.

Neo-Liberalism at Work

This paper examines changes in labor management of workers in UK emergency services under a regime of budget cuts and neoliberal state strategies. It takes an extreme case study, the emergency services, as an example of the limits of privatization and of the need, nonetheless, to re-assert management control over the labor process as part of the long-term strategy to solve the labor problem in public services.

Facing up to Thatcherism : the history of NALGO, 1979-1993

1. NALGO: What Kind of Trade Union? 2. NALGO 1905 to 1978 3. The Advent of Thatcherism 4. The Squeeze Tightens 5. Thatcherites Versus the Trade Union Movement 6. Privatization and the Retreat from National Bargaining 7. Storms: Financial, Climatic, and Industrial 8. Shake it All About: Into the 1990s 9. NALGOs Last Year 10. In UNISON

Training and Collective Bargaining in European Public Services: A Study of Training-Related Issues in French, Finnish and UK Health Services.

It is frequently asserted that there is a link between the nature of training provision within an organization and its success or failure. Within this approach is an assumption that training is simply a neutral tool to be applied to the benefit of all. This article challenges this approach, arguing that training is an issue that may be the subject of disagreement and conflict. Using evidence gained from managers and trade union representatives in health care services in France, Finland and the UK, it is argued that all aspects of training provision are best handled through traditional collective bargaining procedures. This suggests that there is a need to provide training for managers and union representatives to enable them to understand both training issues and collective bargaining procedures.