Our schools in crisis
The public school system in Australia is seriously broken.
The physical infrastructure at many schools is literally falling apart. Administrative obligations continue to mount and swamp us down in bureaucracy. And educators are leaving the profession in droves.
Students are suffering from these deteriorating conditions. School refusal and difficult behaviours are on the rise, and with less and less time and energy on our hands, we’re becoming less equipped to deal with the worsening situation.
Camps are being cut by principals due to limited funding. Teachers and students are spending their days in asbestos portables. Students are getting less and less one-to-one attention and teachers are struggling to build proper relationships with students under the weight of increasing administrative tasks.
It’s going to take some serious changes to fix this. We can’t have business as usual. Our next EBA can’t include another mere 3% wage rise with some small wins on conditions. If we don’t fight to rapidly turn things around, there are going to be no educators left to teach students.
This is why we say that educators’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions.
We need a transformational new agreement to stop the rot in our public school system and get the ball rolling on beginning to repair this mess.
Transformational change
What do we need to transform the public education system in Australia?
We need a serious pay increase and serious changes in conditions, particularly around administrative duties and class sizes.
Our log of claims is strong and would fundamentally change what it means to be an educator in the public school system. A pay increase of 35% over 3 years. Reduced class sizes. More student free days. Reduced face-to-face time. $5,000 bonuses at sign-on and at 3 years, 5 years and then every 5 years after that. And more.
This is a log of claims worth fighting for.
The forces against us
We are going to need to fight to win our demands. The state government and the Murdoch press will fight us tooth and nail. They have never supported us or cared about our struggles in the classroom and they never will, no matter how much we deserve it.
In an election year, the state Labor government will be worried about accusations of being bad with money and cosying up to the unions.
This fight will get nasty. We’ll witness a barrage of insults from the media.
They’ll say the state government can’t afford it.
They’ll say teachers have got it easy. “Teachers get 12 weeks off a year and work from 9 till 3.30!” (Yeah right!).
They’ll say teachers only care about the money, and that we should care more about the children.
They’ll say teachers should put the community first, and not disrupt young people’s education by going on strike.
They’ll say teachers are basically unskilled workers, and that we’re glorified baby sitters–anyone could do it really! So we should therefore be paid accordingly.
They’ll say teaching is a female dominated industry and, well, women just don’t get paid as much as men and that’s just the way things are.
The Allan government has already tried (and thankfully failed) to prevent us from even filing a protected action ballot, after seven months of bargaining. This is a sign of how they are going to treat us as things move forward: with contempt.
Our union
The leadership of our union will need to act as an intermediary between educators and the hostile Allan government.
Given the structure of Australia’s deeply anti-worker industrial relations laws, the union leadership is in a position where they ultimately have to water down our demands, in order to preserve their bargaining relationship.
They’ll say that we should take sub-par deals because they’re as good as we’re gonna get. They’ll try to sugarcoat a crap deal and spin up misinformation, to try to convince us to accept it.
They’ll say “teachers just don’t understand the agreement,” when we protest against a bad deal.
They’ll reel in strike action and move things through backroom negotiations that strip us of our real power–industrial action
We know how this story goes, it happened during the last round of negotiations in 2022, causing thousands of educators to leave the union.
But that doesn’t mean we have to give up.
What is to be done?
The bubbling anger across our schools needs to be directed in the right direction. Yes, the last deal was bad, but how are we going to make the next one better? Leaving the union certainly isn’t the answer.
We are the union. Not the officials who represent us, but we the educators who spend our working days in classrooms. We have strength in numbers.
Getting more people into the union and getting them active in their sub-branches and regions is how we fight against a lousy deal getting pushed onto members
By building our power in each and every school, we protect ourselves against a bad deal. We, the teachers and educators on the ground, need to turn the union into a fighting union from the bottom-up.
Increasing our numbers and density makes us more threatening. When there’s more of us, we have more power to shut schools and interrupt the normal running of society.
Getting more members active– through conversations and getting them to come to sub-branch meetings and regional meetings–means our voices and anger on the ground can be more powerful.
Organised sub-branches and regions will also be far more prepared for attacks by the state government, media and the union bureaucracy.
Strikes
To win transformational change for public education we need to take disruptive strike action. This is the only way our demands will be taken seriously.
This will have ramifications for wider society. Students will miss some classes, parents and carers will likely need to take time off work. This will ratchet up the pressure on union members, the AEU leadership and the state government.
We will need to prepare families for this and be clear in our communication about why we are taking the action we are taking. We will need to develop community support to be successful.
We can’t stop saying that student learning conditions are teacher working conditions.
All of the benefits we enjoy today at work are the product of educators and other workers of past generations demanding them, and striking for them.
We are the only ones with the power to win transformational change for the public education system.