Inside QLD teachers’ campaign

Teachers in Queensland staged their first strike in sixteen years in August and are set to walk out again on 25 November. This would be the first time in more than three decades that Queensland Teachers Union (QTU) members have struck more than once in a year.

Within the QTU, a network of radicals has been campaigning for the union to take more strident action to improve our pay and conditions: that network is called Queensland Teachers Fightback. The strikes are occurring against an intransigent Liberal National Party government, which has on three separate occasions offered teachers a desultory 8 percent pay offer over three years, with no improvements to workload.

While the campaign continues, teachers have already scored a significant victory against the government, voting “no” in a significant majority against its offer on 31 October.

But first, some context. During the last decade of successive Labor state governments, teaching conditions in Queensland significantly deteriorated. When the COVID-19 pandemic first broke out, the then Palaszczuk government froze teachers’ pay for eighteen months, costing teachers thousands. This was followed by an 11 percent wage “increase” over three years, which was so far below inflation that it meant a real wage cut for teachers of 6.5 percent.

Queensland teachers also have the slowest salary progression of anywhere in the country, alongside Tasmania. The situation is so bad that a seventh-year teacher on the Gold Coast could earn $20,000 more by teaching over the border in NSW. Planning time for Queensland teachers is also below the national and OECD average. For high school teachers, our planning time (time when we’re at school but not teaching) hasn’t improved since the 1970s, despite a significant increase in reporting requirements. Our lunch breaks are technically unpaid, but we’re still required to do playground duty. We get two to three student-free days in January (of which only three hours is individual planning time), and then one student-free day in September (which is professional development, not planning time). There is a constant and steady stream of new curriculum updates, program changes and new assessments we write or modify every year without the time in the day to do them. Teachers regularly take sick days just to keep on top of work.

While other states offer 15 days’ sick leave per year, Queensland teachers get only ten. And in a vast state with many regional cities and towns, the remote incentives are nowhere near enough to retain staff and to address the higher cost of living in those areas.

What has not helped our situation is the lack of strike action. Fightback began in 2019 during negotiations for our last agreement, when 94 percent of union members voted to strike in support of our demands, yet our leadership didn’t follow through. Instead, members were encouraged to vote yes to an offer that made no serious improvements to wages or conditions. So, we got started by making some basic arguments—that we shouldn’t vote yes to any offers that aren’t worth voting for. Enterprise bargaining periods provide us with the opportunity to take protected industrial action, so we need to make the most of this—by striking!

Previous offers, which members were recommended to accept by the leadership, would usually pass with 95 percent in favour. In 2019, though, nearly 20 percent of members voted against. This was a significant achievement for a newly formed group with no institutional weight within the union. Fightback tapped into members’ outrage and frustration with the union’s direction and gave them the arguments to use in their schools against the offer. In the past, disgruntled members would have simply left the union. Fightback provided them with a crucial alternative—stay, fight and help organise for something better.

There have been several other industrial campaigns Fightback has been a part of, such as pushing for school closures during the pandemic. In 2023, we ran for the union’s presidential positions on a platform of class struggle and putting our leaders on a workers’ wage. Fightback candidates won between 38 and 44 percent of the vote across the three positions.

But it’s not just industrial questions. Fightback members have made efforts to politicise our workplaces—inviting colleagues to rallies for Palestine, for refugee rights, against the far right and more. We haven’t shied away from speaking out against genocide and bigotry, which sometimes requires a discussion or argument, but is important for deepening our understanding of what fighting for workers’ rights and solidarity is all about.

It was crucial that our members spoke up in defence of other unionists when the CFMEU was put into administration, and their democratic say overruled by Labor state governments. Solidarity isn’t charity; our rights and conditions are genuinely impacted by our government’s treatment of refugees, their support for Israel’s genocide, dictatorial control of other unions, tolerance for the far right and so on. We’ve had Fightback contingents and our banners at many protests this year, showing we don’t just talk the talk, but we walk it as well, and that has helped us identify and connect with sympathisers and fellow activists.

Fightback began our intervention in the current enterprise bargaining campaign by getting some decent demands into our log of claims. We put together some example motions and provided them to our email list and Facebook group—demands such as 10 percent pay rise per year, doubling planning time and increasing sick leave to fifteen days. The motions were taken up with gusto—more than 30 branches voted for our pay demand to be 10 percent per year, and several branches voted for 15 percent.

For many, it was their first time going to a union branch meeting. In one instance, three people who didn’t know each other independently printed the Fightback motions and turned up to the same branch meeting to move them!

Pushing for a decent log of claims was important for raising members’ expectations of what we should be fighting for, rather than tailoring our demands to what we think the government considers acceptable. Part of Fightback’s intervention has been to push for the union to adopt a log of claims with teeth. The QTU has adopted an “interest-based” approach to bargaining, meaning that rather than raising specific demands, the union’s negotiators seek common ground with the government.

Described by the Fair Work Commission as a “consensus-seeking and cooperative” approach to bargaining, interest-based bargaining stands in contrast with a “traditional” adversarial approach, where parties “approach the process with predetermined positions or a log of claims”. It also makes it much harder for workers to hold their representatives to account during negotiations, and vague demands are much harder to mobilise people to campaign for. Fightback has pushed back on this approach, and, thanks to our intervention, more members are now arguing against interest-based bargaining.

Fightback has been making the case for strike action and protests across all the union’s official channels. When the union backed away from implementing work bans last year, Fightback called a snap speak-out outside parliament, which mobilised dozens of teachers and supporters, and, importantly, attracted media coverage.

The 6 August strike confirmed the arguments about strike action Fightback members have been making. These include that, when a lead is given, members will follow. The strike was widely observed, with approximately 50,000 teachers on strike. Five thousand mobilised in Brisbane at the strike meeting and rally, and a further 5,000 gathered across the state in other rallies.

The strike also highlighted the union’s relevance to previously unorganised teachers: 2,300 joined the union just before the strike. And the public got behind the strike—disproving the idea that the public resents teachers striking or won’t back the action. As we marched through the city, the support was obvious, from people clapping and cheering for us to fellow unionists on construction sites downing tools to raise a fist and chant with us.

Despite the positive energy from the strike, the QTU state council, comprising 120 delegates, “paused” consideration of further industrial action for four weeks. Fightback members pushed back where we could. We argued on the floor of council against the idea. In one school, teachers turned a members’ “briefing” on the pause into a proper meeting with debate, and won—carrying a motion opposing the decision.

The strike was crucial for what came after: in late October, teachers were presented with another government offer which had a few minor changes, yet the substance remained: 8 percent over three years, no improvements to workload. The strike had helped raise teachers’ expectations and we had 50,000 teachers out on strike saying 8 percent wasn’t good enough. To be presented with the same pay offer felt like a slap in the face.

Fightback activists jumped into action, campaigning against such an insulting offer. We were presented with the offer on Monday; voting closed that Friday. Our members were quick to put together a leaflet, and were circulating arguments about the pay, the lack of workload improvements and the need for strike action.

While the official position from the union leadership was to request that members give the offer “due consideration”, their communications led with “QTU members secure an improved offer”, claiming it was the government’s “best and final offer” and spelling out the dangers of voting it down. These focused on arbitration: that it’s a lengthy process that would delay any pay increases, and that our existing conditions would be under threat if we voted no. As Fightback (and many other teachers) said in response, given how little there was to lose in the offer, members are ready to “roll the dice” on arbitration. What sitting commissioner is going to gut teachers’ conditions during a teacher shortage?

In a stunning turn, with almost 29,000 members voting, 67 percent voted against the government’s offer. Members shared that they didn’t feel alone and that their faith in their fellow members had been restored.

Union leaders had not been campaigning against the offer. The only voices in the media were the government and a right-wing ex-principal talking about how great it was. But Fightback members campaigned against the offer and carried members with us. Wherever we could, we pushed for special branch meetings. This involved checking the union rules and collecting the small number of signatures required. As of this writing, there have been six special branch meetings called by rank-and-file members in the last two weeks—something pretty unheard of.

The special meetings have been positive for us for a few reasons. They’ve brought members out to vocalise their opposition to the government’s offers and sharpen their arguments for a better deal. They’ve been very well attended, with a combined total of more than 140 members taking part.

With the prospect of arbitration looming, it’s not obvious why we should strike. The meetings have given union members the space to argue to colleagues about why strike action is still crucial: that it shows how important our labour is; that without us, schools stop. And that the past sixteen years without strike action demonstrate that when business isn’t disrupted, our pay and conditions decline. Strikes also make the point that we don’t have to accept what we’re told we deserve by others: not by the government or the union officials, all of whom enjoy much higher salaries and better conditions than teachers. Instead, we can decide what we deserve and fight for it.

Throughout this campaign, members have had a crash course in how the processes of the union work: meeting procedure and protocol, moving and speaking to a motion; all valuable skills that have been useful in this campaign and invaluable for the fights to come.

By using every forum available to make left-wing arguments and try to win rank-and-file members to our perspective, Fightback has won considerable influence among a wide layer of teachers. We have also helped to educate a wider layer to be leaders and fighters in their workplaces and branches.

Fightback is here to stay, and we’re growing. Rebuilding class-struggle unionism is not going to happen overnight, but there are no alternatives. Wherever we are, in a big workplace or small, we’re there to make the key arguments, to give a lead to members who want to see the union fight for more and to argue that fighting for a better world involves pushing on any question, industrial or political, and looking to our collective power to win.