Should we leave the union?
A response to educators who are thinking about tearing up their union membership
Anger
Our union leadership has de-escalated our industrial campaign with the cancellation of our stop work actions and a subpar deal appears to be on the horizon.
Members are furious. 6 regions and 41 schools have passed motions condemning this cancellation, re-endorsing our full log of claims, calling for mass meetings and multi-day strikes.
One of our officials said that they de-escalated the campaign simply because they are ‘getting the sense’ that the Department is taking negotiations more seriously. Insane.
The officials are reducing member expectations, saying: ‘we won’t get 35%’, ‘the pay rise for ES won’t be the same as that for teachers’. Some have even said that a reduction in class sizes will exacerbate the teaching shortage—undermining our log of claims!
Members have been arguing back. We’ve pointed out that members democratically produced this log of claims sub-branch by sub-branch and it is not the role of our elected representatives in the AEU to tell us what we can get. Not to mention that if we don’t fix conditions in schools, through smaller classes, teachers are going to continue to get burnt out and leave the profession in droves.
But other educators have thrown up their hands and walked away from the process saying: “if we don’t get 35% and significant improvements to conditions, I’m leaving the union.”
Is this the right move?
Who is ‘the union’?
On its surface, ripping up our union membership can seem like a bold act. If the union can’t get us a good deal, then what are we paying dues for? See ya!
But what is ‘the union’? Who is ‘the union’?
Is the union the officials who sit at the bargaining table? Or the paid organisers who come and visit our schools? Or the members’ help desk?
Or is it our colleagues in our school and across the state?
We need to make a distinction between the ordinary members of the union, also known as the rank and file, and the paid officials.
As rank-and-file members of the union, we are the ones who are experiencing the crisis in classrooms right now. We are the ones who know what our colleagues go through on a day-to-day basis. We know that we need a transformative deal to fix this crisis.
The union officials, on the other hand, have different interests to us. Their job is to compromise between us and the bosses (the Department). They have different pay and conditions to us that are not tied to our industrial campaign. They care far more about preserving their jobs in the structure of the union than negotiating a transformative agreement for teachers and ES.
Because of this difference in interests between the rank and file and the officials, we don’t have to support the AEU officials in their actions. On the contrary, in order for us to get a good deal, we need to fight the officials who go against our interests. In fact, we should be fighting them as hard as we are fighting the government right now.
How can we fight back?
We have to better communicate our agency as members to our disillusioned colleagues who are thinking about leaving the AEU. Ultimately, it’s us members who have all the power. We can vote down an offer which does not adequately deal with the crisis in public education. And if we are better organised, we can force the officials to escalate our industrial campaign again.
There is no other way to fix the crisis in schools apart from teachers and ES getting organised to work together to fight and fix this together.
Members remember the sell-out that occurred 4 years ago. Large groups of members left the union after the last sell-out. Where did that get us? Only more isolated and less powerful to fight to improve our pay and conditions.
Union deals do not just descend from the government, arbitrarily summoned by our officials. They are fought for, by members on the ground. Just look at how Victorian nurses voted down a deal that wasn’t up to scratch for them, and continued to fight until they were happy.
At the local level we need to be having conversations with our colleagues about what we need to do and what we think of potential offers and whether they meet our demands.
We need to increase the frequency of sub-branch meetings.
We need to keep recruiting.
We need to map our schools for members to identify weak spots and consider who best to talk to any non-members.
This is how we fight disillusionment. Not by simply sitting back and judging whether the actions of our officials are good or not, but by getting active and showing our colleagues that we are the union, not the officials.
The union is us, our co-workers and our relationships with one other
The union is ultimately the product of our relationships that we establish in our schools. These are the basis for all our organising, and the only chance we have to fight back against the government’s nonsense.
Leaving the union in disgust doesn’t move us any closer to building better schools. In fact, it makes it harder to build up the relationships needed to fight back, without the structure of the union to facilitate our solidarity.
If we tear up our union memberships, we not only turn our backs on the rest of our colleagues fighting for a better deal, but we also throw away the best chance we have of fixing the crisis in our schools.
Our officials are doing some pretty nasty stuff at the moment. It’s no wonder people are asking themselves the question of whether they should leave or not.
It’s up to us to convince all of our colleagues that the solution is not to leave, but instead to stay and fight from the bottom up. That means fighting against our officials too, whenever we need to.