Originally Posted by
MaltonNecromancer
This.
In a nutshell, we teachers pay for our own pensions (which is held in the Teachers' Pension Fund). All teachers in the UK pay into this unless you choose to opt out, which no-one does.
The UK government runs and owns the Teachers' Pension Fund. They have used the money from it to gamble on the stock market.
They gambled away £64 billion of our money - none of it was taxpayer's money. We teachers earned that money, through teaching long hours.
Now, when the Average Working Man says things like
I would respond with:
Firstly, not all jobs are equal. Teaching is a highly skilled job, and frankly the reason we're paid more than minimum wage is because we deserve more than minimum wage. I work 8.30 until 7.30 most days, as well as weekends, and it's not manual labour. It's demanding, emotionally draining, intellectually challenging work. Could you trawl through four pages of poorly scrawled writing, trying to decide if a person had used enough adverbial clauses at the front of their sentence combined with an overall sense of structure where openings refer back to closings, with well-judged vocabulary and an implicit understanding of purpose and audience? Because that's what marking year 7 work takes. It gets far more complicated with year 11 and sixth form. And that doesn't even include working ceaselessly to personalise learning, making a lesson on some sometimes bloody boring topics interesting and engaging for a massively disparate group of individuals who at best quite like you and at worse actively want you to die. Teaching is outrageously hard, and how dare you suggest that it's not
Whatever your fatuous and tenuously defined little concept is. The day that being a manual labourer is somehow harder work than beaing a teacher (and I've done both) will never come. Teaching is far harder in every way but the physical.
Now, rage at facile insults at my profession aside, imagine you've paid in thousands of pounds that you earned. It was not given to you: you worked for it. Then the government stole it from you, and had the audacity to run a smear campaign, in which they call you a thief. And everyone believes them (because in their heart, everyone hates teachers. That's something I've come to realise. The masses at large hate us. We're a tolerated necessity, nothing more.)
How would you take that?
How does an Average Working Man respond to his government stealing his money?
From the responses here, I'd imagine he knows his place, realises that it's his job to be his government's victim (because it's been going on for the last 80 years in the UK - the Teachers' Pension Fund has been a source of easy cash for every government, Conservative and Labour, so "Voting them out" won't help because they all do it.)
Maybe the Average Working Man is spineless enough to take that massive hit (which in real terms is going to cost teachers about 20% of their pay packet - could you lose 20% of your pay each month? Because I sure as hell can't), but I kinda doubt it. I think he'd get good and angry, and start looking at legal action. Like us.
Spouting off annoyingly macho nonsense like
serves only to illustrate
a.) You have NO idea what you're on about and
b.) No seriously, you have no idea what you're on about. In simple terms: we've been stolen from; we're not happy about it; voting will change nothing as it is the system at fault rather than a single political party, and thus striking is the only option we are left with.
Now, you might roll over and play good little serf. Fair enough - I suppose it's fine, "so long they don't take the yam from your savouring mouth" to quote Niyi Osundare. Well we refuse to. These people are not our lords and betters; they're just thieves with good PR.
Anyway, when they come for you, and steal from you, don't worry - we teachers will remember the lessons you taught us: to tell you to shut up and stop complaining, and maybe do some real work, like say marking 187 exams in your spare time.