Rebellion in the AEU: officials prevent debate as vote approaches on terrible deal

Australian Education Union members across Victoria will meet on 15-18 June to make a crucial decision: to accept or reject an in-principle agreement our union leaders have reached with the state government. They claim it is the best we can get, but it is far from it.

Socialists in Schools, a campaign group within the AEU, have been organising school staff to oppose the deal and push the union leaders to resume industrial action. We want to win an agreement that addresses our grievances—unpaid overtime, crushing workloads, poor pay, among other things—and gains the funding we need to turn around the crisis in Victorian public schools.

Since the agreement was reached, the AEU leaders have been in overdrive trying to sell it to the wider membership. They want to wrap this all up quickly so they get back to their true passion in life: campaigning for the ALP in the next state election.

While the odds are stacked against our side, reports from across the state indicate that officials are finding it harder than they expected to push this agreement through.

One way they are pitching the deal is through online briefings. In these, all participants’ cameras are forcibly turned off so that we can’t see anyone, not even a list of participants’ names. Our microphones are muted. The chat function is disabled. We are permitted to ask questions, but have to direct them to moderators who no one can see and who do not answer.

In the middle of one of these briefings, I recalled an excursion I once took a class on to Pentridge Prison. The wonderful tour guide explained how prisoners were made to wear masks whenever they left their cells to avoid fraternisation. It made me think that the AEU leaders might be getting inspiration for their online crowd control from the wrong places.

“Briefings” turn out to be their favourite event format. AEU regional meetings, which bring together union members across schools within a particular geographic area, are also turned into “briefings”. Unlike regular meetings, where union members have the right to put motions to the floor and debate them, briefings are a top-down affair in which the union leaders present the union’s “wins” at length, motions and debate are not allowed, and the officials get the last word every time.

Their decision to rejig these events is likely in response to the last round of regional meetings, where the officials were trounced and condemned by members in five regions for cancelling our strikes before we had received an adequate offer from the government.

Despite their best efforts to take up all the time and bore us into passivity, these briefings are full of angry school staff who are there to hold their leaders to account. Everywhere they go, officials face hostile questions and comments from frustrated union members. What about our crushing workloads? Why aren’t we being back paid to the date on which our last agreement expired? Why can’t we resume strikes to keep pushing for more? Why is the pay rise between teachers, and between teachers and Education Support staff unequal? Why is the union confusing members with compounded figures when our pay claim was not? It goes on.

At the Maribyrnong briefing, Marino D’Ortenzio, vice president of the union’s secondary school division, openly argued that strikes don’t work. It’s unclear why he chose to be head of a trade union if he believes this. The best that negotiator Erin Aulich (the union’s branch secretary) could muster is that “it’s an imperfect agreement”. Thank you for your hard work, Erin.

At the inner-city briefing, AEU President Justin Mullaly was forced to admit that there are many “imperfections” in the agreement. We asked him to consider sending out a list of these imperfections so that union members can hear both sides of the debate, rather than just the propaganda the AEU leaders are currently dishing out. He failed to respond.

When questioned about what the agreement will do to address all the unpaid overtime teachers perform—on average 12.4 hours per week—Briley Stokes, the union’s vice president, told the inner-west briefing that teachers should only work their contracted 38 hours. Mullaly echoed this at the inner-city meeting, patronising teachers, “You just need to work to your hours”. This is the exact level of insight and empathy we’ve come to expect from AEU leaders, but it is enraging nonetheless.

Of course, teachers and school staff should try to limit the unpaid work we do. But wouldn’t it be better to fight for and win an education system that doesn’t expect and require unpaid work from us? Wouldn’t it be more effective to take action together, rather than individually, and use our leverage to shut down schools and demand the pay and dignity we’re worth? An impassioned high school teacher at the inner-city briefing argued for more industrial action and the importance of strikes for winning our claims and gaining respect. They received a standing ovation.

Members aren’t being silenced or ground down into voting yes easily. Many members and sub-branches are showing a determination to fight and keep this campaign alive and kicking. In many school sub-branch meetings, AEU officials are similarly facing very hostile questioning from frustrated union members. There is an extraordinary number of documents circulating via email and social media to explain and critically analyse the deal, because no one trusts the documentation produced by the union itself. Socialists in Schools members have heard that AEU officials refer to these explainers as “misinformation” at union events where we are not present, but they have not challenged the facts of anything we have produced.

The union, as a stand-in for the ALP, wants to narrow the horizons of our campaign and have us quietly accept the broken status quo. In Socialists in Schools, our vision for the union is the opposite. We want to give people the resources, confidence and politics to make ambitious demands on the government, challenge the leadership when they try to keep us down, and empower every member of the union to have a voice and actively participate in debates and the direction of the campaign. We want union members to feel their power by engaging in serious strike action, which can force the government to give us what we want. The fight for a better offer from the government thus goes hand in hand with the fight for democracy in our union.

We reject the notion that our list of demands is a crazy wishlist, as union leaders have suggested. On the contrary, it’s a document outlining the changes that thousands of educators believe are worth fighting for, and want to fight for. We reject the union leaders’ claim that this is the best the government could give. We barely put up a fight.

It must be said that, because of the lack of democracy in the union, it is difficult to fully gauge the members’ mood across the state. Absurd meeting procedures, the tyrannical deleting of comments and blocking of critical members on AEU social media, and, most importantly, the fact that many sub-branches are deliberately kept completely disconnected from one another, make it very hard to predict the outcome of this vote.

In our short existence, members of Socialists in Schools have heard that our resources have been shared widely, but we are honest that there are many more schools with which we have no connections.

Our members will spend the next week emailing, calling and producing materials to promote the “no” vote, but it will be an uphill battle given the union’s resources and platform and the energy and enthusiasm the officials have deliberately wasted through months of inaction. The union’s voting system will also not help our case. For every twenty or fewer members, each sub-branch (school) gets one vote. Theoretically, this means a school with a handful of union members, or even one, will have the same weight as a school with twenty.

We know there is no choice but to fight, though. In the last year, Australia’s billionaires increased their ranks to 178, a record high, according to Oxfam Australia. They also collectively increased their wealth by $25.67 billion, almost $50,000 a minute. Meanwhile, one in three households experienced food insecurity in the past twelve months, meaning they were stressed about or struggled to put food on the table. Federal Labor’s recent budget will not fix this. We need to do it ourselves by returning to a militant industrial campaign.

Arguments that are convincing some members to vote yes are the threat of a hard right-wing state government that might be even more hostile to teachers, the threat of arbitration leaving us in limbo, or that the current agreement could be “ripped up” and we will have to start from scratch if we turn it down. Yet in 2024, Victorian nurses rejected an offer pushed by the government and their union, only to win a significantly bigger pay rise just a month later. The earliest the government could take the AEU to arbitration is October. The strategy of relying on the ALP is the reason we’re in this mess. If we reject this offer and resume a campaign of industrial action, like many members want to do, it is an open question as to what we win, but it is highly unlikely we would get anything less.

In 2022, when the AEU leaders betrayed their members by pushing through an historically appalling offer, 40 percent rejected it. Conditions in schools have continued to deteriorate, and school staff are being pushed to the brink as they try to meet the demands of the job and the needs of each child, while we try to hold on to our sanity and dignity. Outside of schools, the housing and cost-of-living crises have made many facets of our lives harder as our purchasing power dwindles, particularly for education support staff, whose criminally low wages should be a national disgrace.

We have a chance with this campaign to draw a line in the sand and collectively say “no”: