Trained for Unemployment: A Note on Passivity among Unemployed Teachers
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Abstract
This expression of frustration and anger comes from one of Britain's 24,000 unemployed teachers. After more than thirty years of providing an assured career outlet for large numbers of students in higher education, and an avenue of social mobility for those amongst them from working class backgrounds, school teaching is now one of the professions contributing heavily to the rising unemployment rates. The recent extensions of cuts in public expenditure have led to the suggestion that another 50,000 teachers may soon be joining their colleagues in the rapidly lengthening dole queues. Despite the general mass unemployment of recent years, however, there has been relatively little systematic research into the experiences, consciousness and political potential of the unemployed; and certainly hardly anything to match Bakke's classic 1930's study of unemployed industrial workers. This absence of research is particularly marked when one turns to unemployment amongst those groups who make up the professional and managerial class (PMC). While the comparative brevity of a history of unemployment among this class is a factor that has contributed to the 'silence' of sociologists in this area, the PMC is clearly a class that has become increasingly important to the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. This importance, in part, has led some sociologists to speculate on the political and indeed socialist possibilities of the PMC. In spite of this interest, however, few studies have as yet been forthcoming of sections of that class at a moment in its development — growing unemployment — when one might have expected the political potential of the PMC to be about to be realised. This general comment is particularly poignant for research on teacher unemployment, of which, to our knowledge, there is a total absence, whether teachers are conceptualised within the PMC or not. It is perhaps surprising