Industrial Union 620
This is a site set up for IWW members engaged in the education sector throughout the UK. Our aim is to organise members of this sector into a strong network of militant activists, committed to revolutionising the way we learn, and ultimately, the way we live.
Throughout its history, formal education has remained an institutional framework that imbues conservative values of obedience and sumbission to authority and capital onto the minds of those - often young and impressionable - who wish to learn knowledge and skills. It remains a vehicle for the entrenchment of differentiation between class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, and other divisions, thus helping to maintain a divided society for the benefit of those at the top. The social power of education in shaping the minds of people who enter into the education process is enormous, and so the social responsibility for radicals working in the sector is equally important in the struggle for the abolition of wage slavery altogether.
Those working in the education sector, be they researchers, teachers, administrators, students, cleaners, or any others, find themselves squeezed and pressured to perform to a certain set of values. Radical researchers are victimised, cleaners attempting to unionise are intimidated, students are forced into increasingly capital-oriented courses and are taught conformity, teachers are over-worked, and all are undervalued regarding their contribution to the future of millions of lives. This is a time at which bums-on-seats, corporate sponsorship and cost-benefit analysis are highest on the agenda for the bosses and the state, irrespective of the human and social effects in the real world.
The IWW sees education as a potentially radical tool, yet in its current guise it is forcefully conservative. We hope that all education workers will see the need for a radical, direct-action, union in this present climate, and that they will join us to transform education from within; to build a new education system in the shell of the old.
do you work in a cafe, restaurant or coffee shop in an educational institution?
visit the new BARISTAS UNITED website: the IWW Coffee Shop Workers' Union
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then join us: download our application form today
If you have any suggestions for the site, do not hesitate to contact us