A teaching assistant and mother of four has called her salary, which is just 18p above minimum wage, “disrespectful”.
Rebecca Ring, who works at Ysgol Uwchradd Aberteifi in Cardigan, Ceredigion, is a union representative for Unison.
Members will vote on a possible strike in which the union will demand a 12.7% pay rise for teaching assistants and other council staff, including caretakers and garbage collectors.
They were offered a pay rise of £1,925, a 9% increase for the lowest paid workers.
Ms Ring is a trained social worker but said she worked in the education sector while raising her children.
She earns £10.60 an hour, 18p more than the hourly minimum wage.
She’s contracted to work a 30-hour week, but says she often works extra hours for no extra pay.
Her responsibilities as a teaching assistant include assisting teaching staff by assisting students who may have difficulty following classes, particularly those with behavioral or additional learning needs.
Since the pandemic, the pressure on her and others in the same role has increased dramatically, she said.
“We’re seeing more and more students coming through the doors and needing extra support in the classroom,” she said.
“In a classroom of 30 people, where you used to only need one class assistant per class, you now need two or maybe three assistants.
“We have to meet all of these requirements at once.”
As a Unison representative at her school, she called on her colleagues to vote for the strike.
“We only demand fair pay like everyone else and what we think we deserve,” she said.
“We ask them to consider all factors – look at the work we do, look at the hours we work, the skills we bring, and then try to set a fair pay that this reflects.”
She said classroom assistants need a salary that means they don’t “have to worry about the cost of one or two family rewards and even the school uniform and basic things like that.”
She said her 17-year-old son, who works at a local supermarket while he is studying for his A-levels, makes about a pound an hour more than she does.
“Of course I’m happy for him, he’s fine,” she said. “However, we realize that we are not being paid the fair wages we deserve for the jobs we undertake, especially as our time and expertise are more demanded.”
“I’m not saying he doesn’t do skilled work, but I do feel that the work we do in the classrooms is more demanding and more skilled.”
“We all go through a certain level of training, we have to renew a lot of this training every year, we are constantly learning to learn new skills and also to find new ways to support the students in our care.”
“To learn that we’re making less than someone in the supermarket is really quite disheartening.”
The unison vote on strike action ends on July 4th.
The Welsh Local Government Association declined to comment.
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