After a long battle, two strikes and two offers voted down by members, we’ve finally reached agreement with the government with 79% of members voting in favour of the deal.
We fought hard and won massive concessions from the government. Concessions that we were told were “impossible.”
That’s not to say that we won everything and transformed the public education sector. We still have lots to fight for. But this campaign has activated a massive chunk of our workforce and brought them into the union.
These are all huge wins that allow us to build on our on-the-ground organisation in the future.
So what can we learn from the campaign? How did we get here and what are our next steps?
Industrial action gets results
This campaign saw us strike for the first time in 13 years, and not just once, but twice. Even though our strike muscle had been seriously weakened, our determination to take industrial action paid off massively.
Every single time we took strike action, or even threatened stop-work action, the government moved.
On the eve of our first strike, we got the first (atrocious) pay offer from the government after months of little movement at the table. Though the offer was terrible, it showed that strikes forced the government to get their act together and move negotiations along.
When we threatened a series of regional half-day stop works (which our officials ultimately cancelled), we again got an improved offer, this time at a 28%-32% pay increase for both ES and teachers.
When we threatened to strike again for a second statewide 24-hour stop work, we got a third offer from the government, this time finally addressing conditions with a 1 hour reduction in meetings for teachers each week and ES pay rises moving into base pay rather than an allowance.
And now with the threat of a third all-in strike looming, we got the final offer from the government with an extra $2000 sign-on bonus and 1% bonuses for top-of-the-range ES and teachers.
We need to learn from this evidence.
Lobbying the Labor party for 12 years with no strikes didn’t get us anywhere. Media campaigns and advertisements on billboards or noticeboards didn’t get us anywhere. Clever backroom negotiating between our officials and the government with no industrial action to support it didn’t get us anywhere. Work bans were only partially effective.
But it was strike action that placed the ultimate serious pressure on the government to actually give in to our demands.
Strikes also activated the membership in a way that nothing else did. We have an extra 20,000 members across the state. We have active sub-branches in schools where no union organisation existed beforehand. We have new activists who want to democratise our union so that we can win bigger next time.
We can vote No, even when our officials say Yes
For the first time since at least the 1980s, we voted down an agreement that had been endorsed by our officials.
This builds on the achievement of the Victorian nurses in 2024 when they also voted down an in-principle agreement and won big. Any group of workers looking at a sub-par deal that their officials are trying to sell will now be able to look to both us and the Nurses and learn that they don’t just have to tow the line.
We can vote No and win far more. And we didn’t do it just once, but twice. Because of our rejection of the second and third offers we won:
ES pay increase being added to base pay, not allowances.
Annual 1% bonus for all top-of-range teachers and ES
$2000 sign-on bonus (in lieu of back-pay)
Reduction of 1 hour of meetings per week for teachers
These are wins that we were told were impossible from our leadership, and that the second offer was “as good as we’re gonna get.”
Together with our use of strike action, the big takeaway for us has to be that if we don’t fight, we lose! That means fighting our officials too, just as hard as the government if we need to.
We didn’t get everything
That’s not to say that we won everything. Our log of claims was very ambitious and would have transformed public education if we had won it:
Pay increase of 35% over 3 years
Reduced class sizes
Reduction in face-to-face time
$5,000 bonuses at sign-on, 3 years and 5 years and every 5 years after that.
This was a log of claims that brought lots of ES and staff in to fight for it. We need to continue that fight in the long-term into the next agreement and beyond. We have now raised the bar on what is possible, with thousands of teachers now demanding reduced class sizes and reduction in face-to-face time. Many of whom are frustrated with the limited outcome of this agreement.
This puts us in a very strong position for the future. Our union hasn’t been this active, with so many members itching for a fight, in decades.
What next?
What will that fight look like?
For starters, we need to be far more organised. We ran into some significant limitations because members were isolated in our sub-branches and unable to seriously coordinate across schools or regions.
We need to build a rank-and-file network of teachers and ES that can better organise strikes that actually shut down workplaces. A network that can better organise events to communicate to parents and the broader community about what we’re fighting for. A network that is in a better position to organise against the officials when they try to de-escalate our campaign.
This network can’t just be restricted to the loudest activists, leftists or socialists. It needs to include every militant in the union that is willing to fight for transformational change in education, regardless of their broader ideological beliefs.
We also need to seriously democratise our union. Branch Council consistently acted to rubber stamp whatever the officials wanted, without actually representing rank-and-file members. We need to flip that around.
Every militant willing to fight in the interests of their colleagues should run for Branch Council next year.
We also need greater participation at regional meetings and in our sub-branches. We can’t rely on the officials to keep up the momentum we have achieved so far. It will be over to us to implement the agreement on the ground and enforce all the wins that we’ve achieved in this agreement.
That can only be done through active sub-branches and through comparing notes with other schools through regional meetings and other rank-and-file networks.
Most importantly in the short-term, we need to convince all our colleagues to stay in the union so that enforcement of our wins can be as successful as possible. Now is the time to turn our fight to our schools and, if necessary, push our Prins to adhere to the new agreement.
So let’s keep building our organisation, convince all our colleagues to stay in the union and keep fighting for transformational change in our schools. That starts by enforcing the wins of this agreement through our sub-branches over the next few years.