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A trade union perspective on the pressures across the Public Sector and in the Universities by Jack O'Connor speaking at the Irish Universities Association HR Conference on September 29, 2006.

Education holds a special place in hearts and minds of trade unionists. For many of us the trade union movement has been our school and our university of life and it is no accident that unions have played a leading role in the development of adult education over the past century.

This was because, historically, education was the preserve of the elite. It was only in the nineteenth century that primary education became accessible to the great majority of people, as part of the convergence between the great exercise in nation building that took place across Europe, the recognition of the need for an educated labour supply by industry and state bureaucracies, and the demands of the incipient trade union, labour and socialist movements. It was only in the past half century, after the greatest war in human history, that third level education became more widely accessible to ordinary working people. In large part this was due to a new social contract between old ruling elites and the emerging labour movement based on a realisation that naked class warfare and the conflicts it bred took a terrible and unsustainable toll.

Now it seems the tide is turning as collective historic memories recede and an increasingly greedy element promotes neo-liberal ideology to colonise the provision of public goods. Nowhere has this process been more insidious than in education, not alone at university level but in our secondary and primary schools sectors as well.

This has had a two-fold effect: on the one hand it has once more made a good education the preserve of the well-off who can afford fees, on the other it has led to growing public scepticism about the independence and value of the research carried out by these institutions. Food companies funding research into nutrition or GM crops do not inspire confidence, nor do drug companies funding health foundations. These trends are not good for research, for education or for society in general.

Such is the insidious power of these big corporations and the consumer culture that they assiduously promote that it is far harder for academic institutions or individual academics, no matter how distinguished, to resist this trend than the power of the state, or the church in past eras. A new international pecking order is being devised, based on a results driven agenda, in fields such as science, engineering and business studies. This is most blatantly the case with the way in which the new Shanghai Jiao Tong World Ranking of Universities is being promoted.

Not alone universities and academics, but students and parents are being co-opted into a system that tells them that if they want to succeed they must become part of it. It trades on insecurity and cultivates competitiveness; brainwashing parents and children into believing that if they want to succeed in life they must aim for the most prestigious professions and train in the most prestigious institutions. 

Inevitably this exacerbates divisions and social inequalities within society. Regrettably there are powerful forces within Ireland anxious to herd us into this new world order in education where, to paraphrase Michael McDowell, inequality will be rewarded.

The recent OECD surveys, ‘Education at a Glance’ and ‘Starting on Strong II’, show very clearly where we come in the continuum of educational disadvantage. As you know, ‘Education at a Glance’, places Ireland 29th out of 31 countries in terms of GDP spend on education and 20th out of 33 in terms of actual per capita spending. ‘Starting Strong II’ puts us 17th out of 20 countries on the relative child poverty index, with only Italy, the United States and Mexico below us.

The United Kingdom does not fare much better when it comes to child poverty than Ireland, but it does fare better at 15th place in the same ‘Starting Strong II’ league. It begs questions about the quality and efficacy of the education we are giving our children. I believe that a recent survey highlighted by Compass found that 70 per cent of three year olds in Britain recognised the McDonalds sign but less than half of them knew their own surname.

Nor does the situation improve with age. The 2005 FÁS Training Strategy found that 70 per cent of our workforce has no higher than second level qualifications, although more than 60 per cent of new jobs in our ‘knowledge economy’ will require third level qualifications over the coming years.

We are not doing near enough to meet this challenge. Less than forty per cent of our students are continuing to third level, compared to over 60 per cent in many of our competitor economies, according to the OECD. We may be in the fortunate position where we can recruit highly skilled migrant workers from abroad in the short term, including many of the new EU accession states, but for how long? Dell is the latest company to locate a major European facility in Poland. It has even offered employees in Ireland, including 400 Polish employees, the opportunity to relocate, indicating just how quickly international business trends can change and impact on ordinary people’s lives.

It is no surprise that we are falling behind, because Irish business steadfastly refuses to invest in Research and Development.  According to the OECD’s 2005 edition of Research and Development Statistics (RDS) Ireland comes 20th out of 30 countries in terms of the percentage of our GDP we spend on R&D, at just over one per cent.

But even this figure is deceptively high. The latest Forfas Innovation survey for September 2006 says that two-thirds of R&D in Ireland is conducted by foreign multinationals. Remove them from the equation and Forfas reveals that the levels of investment in R&D by Irish companies are amongst the lowest in the OECD.

Public funding for R&D has increased sharply under the National Development Plan for 2000-2006, but Forfas says it has not kept pace with economic growth and that university research is one of the sectors most under funded.

It is significant that while the two largest handicaps to research by industry are lack of funds and the high costs involved, the next biggest handicap is lack of suitable personnel.

While Forfas says the Government intends to raise the percentage of Irish GDP spent on R&D to 2.5 per cent by 2013, this will barely bring us up to the OECD average. It will still leave us behind countries such as Sweden, Finland, Japan, Switzerland, Iceland, Korea and the United States.

All this is happening at a peculiar conjuncture in our education system. Currently the number of children going through primary and secondary schools is continuing to fall. There were 505,883 primary school pupils in 1994, but only 446,029 ten years later. Similarly, the numbers at second level fell from 367,645 to 337,851 over the same decade. However, in Education at a Glance, the OECD has identified indicative trends which show that the Irish school going population, almost uniquely among OECD countries will rise by almost 20 per cent over the next ten years.

Spain and Israel are the only other two countries with projected increases of over ten per cent in the school going population aged between 5 and 14. In fact the vast majority of OECD countries are expected to experience dwindling numbers of children at school as populations generally age and decline.

So we are at a critical point in our development where the extra resources currently available to us must be used, as a matter of urgency, to upgrade facilities at primary and secondary level before the next wave of youngsters enter the system. And this policy must also be extended to include the tertiary level in order to ensure we can catch up with our neighbours in eastern, as well as western and northern Europe.   

Nor can we forget about the 70 per cent of existing workers who left school with a Leaving Cert, a Junior Cert or no cert at all. What are we doing for them at present? Well I have to tell you very little, and if it was not for the trade union movement we would be doing almost nothing at all. In ‘Towards 2016’ we did manage to secure a review of workplace learning and upskilling programmes that will allow a new institutional framework to emerge that will address systemic educational deficits from basic learning problems regarding literacy and numeracy, to providing targeted guidance, learning and training programmes up to and including access for workers to third level courses.

But we have a long way to go if we are to catch up with, let alone outpace the growing knowledge economies of Scandinavia and many East European countries, including Russia. Again, to quote another league table from ‘Education at a Glance’, we come 16th out of 21 countries in terms of the amount of time we give people for informal job related training – 200 hours out of a normal working life compared with 900 in Denmark and over 700 in France and Switzerland. The discrepancy is even greater when you consider that people start their fulltime working life later and retire earlier in many EU states than we do in Ireland.

I have dwelt somewhat on education but the reality is that corporate business has invaded the whole world of public goods from transport to energy, and from health to telecommunications. The eircom debacle slowed but it did not stop the champions of privatisation, who carry out their colonising activities under the watchwords of deregulation and competition, much as nineteenth century missionaries spread the blessings of imperial rule under the camouflage of promoting Christianity and civilisation.

 It is no accident that SIPTU has found itself in a series of disputes across these sectors defending public ownership, or at least public accountability for how these services are delivered. Nor is it an accident that these Organised workers in these sectors have helped maintain decent working conditions and pay rates across the wider economy.

I think few, if any sectors of the Irish economy are more heavily unionised than education. At a time when the government, academic institutions and even some professional bodies are succumbing to the missionary activities of corporate business, it is unions such as SIPTU which are providing the organisational structures around which genuine academic independence and educational standards can be defended.

I want to say that we in SIPTU fully endorse the Gratz Declaration of 2003 and its insistence that ‘Higher Education exists to serve the public interest and is not a “commodity”.’ We also support the 1998 UNESCO Declaration on Higher Education and its recognition that:

The mission of higher education is to contribute to the sustainable development improvement of society as a whole by: educating highly qualified graduates able to meet the needs of all sectors of human activity; advancing, creating and disseminating knowledge through research; interpreting, preserving and promoting cultures in the context of cultural pluralism and diversity; providing opportunities for higher learning throughout life; contributing to the development and improvement of education at all levels; and protecting and enhancing civil society by training young people in values which form the basis of democratic citizenship and by providing critical and detached perspectives in the discussion of strategic choices facing societies.

(http://www.eua.be/eua/index.jsp)

Kathleen Lynch in her recent article for the European Educational Research Journal (Vol 5, No 1, 2006) on ‘Neo-liberalism and Marketisation: the implications for higher education’ makes the point that more and more people are recognising there is a fundamental contradiction between this view of education as a public good and the increasingly prevalent business oriented, privatised approach we are experiencing in Ireland. As she points out the increased international choice of courses for students we are witnessing today is often only accessible to those who also have access to private funding.

The new orthodoxy can only be challenged effectively if people are willing to go back to the basic ideals of democracy and human solidarity that inform the trade union and labour movements. Education is a right to which we should all have access and to make that access meaningful will require the sort of changes we have begun to achieve, in outline, in ‘Towards 2016’.

There is a lot of talk about the need for universities and other third level institutions to build links with the business community, to undertake research for industry and to provide a steady supply of skilled labour to meet the personnel needs of these sectors. We too want to strengthen our universities as centres of research, of teaching and of academic excellence, but we do not believe we can do it by simply facilitating a takeover by chequebook donors from the corporate sector, who seems to think they have a divine right to reorder the world to suit themselves. We believe that it is also time we began to build links between third level institutions and civil society, to build links with local communities, with trade unions, with cultural groups, including those of migrant workers, and with organisations representing people with disbilities and other marginalised sectors.

As Kathleen Lynch says, universities developed a high degree of public trust because of the work they did, undertaking research and teaching for the public good. People had a hope and an expectation that those given the privilege of freedom to think, research and write would do so for the benefit of humanity. That universities would at least aspire to help the weakest in our society as well as laud the most powerful. That hope and that expectation are fast eroding.  

As I said earlier, the labour movement was an early advocate of further education. In 1895 four Fabians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw came together to found the London School of Economics whose aim would be ‘the betterment of society’ by engaging in teaching and original research. SIPTU, in its own modest way, provides courses and education and training grants for members, and indeed members of other unions, through our Education and Training Department.  I wonder if the time has not come for trade unions and academics in Ireland to come together and look at some fresh initiative in our own society that would breathe fresh life into the idea of education being about something broader and better than simply supplying a given quota of narrowly qualified and narrowly focussed professionals to corporate Ireland.

We should not be shy of demanding a say in how our educational system is run. Despite the highly publicised gifts and foundations provided by large corporations and wealthy individuals, the vast majority of funding for education at all levels comes from the public purse. At primary and secondary level 90 per cent of funds come from the taxpayer and at third level it is over 75 per cent in the EU, and over 70 per cent in the bastion of the private university, the United States of America.

This pattern of exaggerating the role of the private sector in the provision of public goods and services is not restricted to education. Nor is it done simply to massage the egos of some wealthy individuals, but to disarm the critics of creeping privatisation and allow them ever greater access to the most profitable, or potentially most profitable areas of activity.

If such a policy succeeds the long-term effect can only be damaging for all concerned. Universities are certainly as vital to building our civil infrastructure as political parties, business lobby groups, voluntary organisations, community groups and, dare I say it, trade unions. We rely on them for the advanced thinking and research that will anticipate the problems and challenges we will face in the future, not just the economic challenges which appear to be the main currency of modern political parties but the problems they generate such as global warming and the atomisation of society.

It seems to me therefore that everyone, even corporate Ireland, has a vested interest in a new social contract and there is nowhere better to forging one than here between academics and trade unionists who are, very often, the same people.

The challenges posed by globalisation and the targets outlined in the Lisbon Agenda must be met and indeed surpassed if the possibility of continuing prosperity is to be maintained.  However, the question is as to the mechanism which offers the best way forward for our society given the lessons of historical experience. 

The Government’s commitment to the establishment of a new PhD level of education is welcome, necessary and if not already late, certainly not a moment too soon.  Clearly it presents issues for our existing third level institutions and for the way third level education is organised and delivered.  the Minister for Finance in his Budget speech argued that it was not sensible to have our third level institutions pitched against each other across all key disciplines, and called for the promotion of a system-wide collaboration across the sector.  However, he went on to announce €300m for the Strategic Innovation Fund and referred to competition for the new funds as a stimulant for excellence through collaboration and change.  I detect a certain contradiction in this and it is one which is at the very core of the question of how we meet the challenges posed by these dramatically changing times. (Incidentally, I think the contradiction is also reflected in the absence of anything like the kind of equivalent initiative required to achieve a radical step up in the skills enhancement of those already at work.)

The new national agreement, ‘Towards 2016’, is constructed on the premise of continuing social partnership. If the stakeholders progress their agenda consistent with this principle then there is the potential to achieve an outcome that is better than just an aggregation of all the constituent parts.  However, we must be conscious of the limitations.  The process cannot serve as an alternative to the urgent need to overcome deficiencies in public funding of education and of research and development, viz a viz the advanced economies.  It cannot overcome the failure to fund our educational institutions and enable them to provide third level courses on a non fee paying basis to the great army of workers who do not have such a qualification, and to whom the achievement of a qualification is critical in the changing economic environment.  Incidentally, it is not only critical to them but to the requirement to continuously enhance skill levels and productivity in our economy. The present demographic gap in the numbers leaving second level provides a “once in a generation” opportunity to do this.

Regrettably, I think there is a growing tendency towards the importation of the most undesirable aspects of employment practices from those in the private sector who are at the forefront of the exploitation of workers in the pursuit of profit to the exclusion of all else.  Contracting out as a means of replacing workers on half reasonable terms of employment with those who are vulnerable and unfortunate enough to subsist at the bottom of the labour market, and the increasing use of fixed term contracts to deprive workers in all categories and disciplines of a measure of security of tenure, are examples of this trend.  It reflects a short-term grab for “competitive advantage” as against a medium or longer-term appreciation of the concept of value for money in its wider social and intellectual context.

The provisions of the new agreement, especially in Clause 28 of Section 9, entail an extensive commitment on the part of organised workers across the Public Sector, as well as in education, to embrace flexibility and change.  Change is always difficult, especially for those who must bear the burden of it without being able to initiate or influence it.  The commitment places a considerable burden of responsibility on those in authority, at both policy and management level. 

It is critical that they recognise that all the sections and clauses in it are premised on the basis of a uniquely subtle and well developed approach to change and problem solving, which, in order to succeed, must afford parity of esteem to all the stakeholders, even those who must bear the greater part of the burden of change.  It calls for skill and imagination, but more than that, it calls for an outlook that is focused on the “sustainable development and improvement of society as a whole”, rather than a grubby pre-occupation with institutional advantage or private gain. 

Even for those who believe they are imbued with these values it is critically important to be seen to be so, and that this is reflected in their approach and in the agenda they are pursuing.  Failure to recognise that this is central and core to the process of change will result in resistance, very possibly undermining the Agreement and the prospects for the development of our education system and institutions to the degree that is necessary to support the prosperity of our society going forward. Certainly we can only go forward on the basis social justice and equity, rather than mere economic growth rate, if access to the educational continuum is possible for all. 



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