‘School’s out!’ Thousands of Queensland teachers strike for better pay and conditions
The Queensland Teachers’ Union, the largest public sector union in Queensland, took strike action on 7 August for the first time in sixteen years. In the lead-up, the union gained 2,000 new members, and staffrooms were full of discussion and debate.
Queensland Teachers Fightback, a rank-and-file network of union members, held a gathering before the strike meeting with dozens of teacher activists. We marched into the Brisbane Convention Centre together, picking up teachers on the way.
The vibe inside was electric. Four thousand teachers filled the meeting hall; hundreds more spilled into the lobby. Another 5,000 packed out more than 30 regional locations to take part in the mass meeting. Unionists from the Electrical Trades Union greeted us on the steps of the Convention Centre along with a crowd featuring the flags of many other unions.
After the meeting, we marched to the parliament. Students cheered from the sidelines, and it wasn’t hard to convince them to join us. Construction workers downed tools and cheered us on from their job sites as we marched past.
This is the kind of action that socialists and Queensland Teachers Fightback activists have been advocating for years. Teachers walked away from the rally feeling a foot taller; the confidence we felt on the day will not soon be forgotten.
Strike action tips the scales in favour of workers when it comes to improving our conditions. This strike should not be a one-off event; more will be needed to address our deteriorating conditions.
The latest offer from the state government includes an 8 percent wage increase over three years. Regarding workload, we’ve been offered an insulting single student-free day for the last day of the year, a meaningless concession when most schools run alternative programs for that whole week. The government claims its Red Tape Reduction strategy will reduce workload for teachers, but it’s mostly targeted at school management red tape (not teachers) and includes more than twenty initiatives that begin with words like “investigate” and “consider”.
We need money for public schools to raise wages and hire more teachers to facilitate smaller classes and more planning time. Instead, it’s being spent on subsidising the mining industry and private schools. Our campaign is up against an intransigent, anti-worker government, and needs to be escalated.
Unfortunately, the union leaders have not proposed any escalation. The mass meeting did little to clarify where to from here, or to meaningfully involve rank-and-file teachers in the process. Four resolutions were put to the meeting, but union members were told there would be no debate and no space to move amendments. One resolved to conduct another 24-hour stoppage “on a date to be determined”.
One of the union’s few explicit demands is for teachers and principals to be deemed “public officers” within the criminal code. This would mean that students who assault staff would face criminal penalties.
The LNP may be willing to legislate for more punitive measures rather than create better learning environments. But this would hardly improve teachers’ conditions. The union’s demand will only lead to more funds going to police and prisons, while our schools continue to be underfunded by billions of dollars.
We became teachers because we care about our students. We didn’t become teachers to become cops. Genuine improvements to educational environments—such as significantly reduced class sizes and more specialist teachers, social workers, guidance officers and psychologists—would go a long way to reducing behaviour incidents, protecting teachers and students, and improving workloads.
Giving us more time would help with the administrative burden of dealing with antisocial behaviour and improve local decision-making regarding abusive behaviour. Having a more confident, combative union movement would be another big step towards addressing student behaviour.
It’s claimed that “we are already in a teacher shortage”, so we cannot fight for these improvements. But taking this attitude will only mean the problems will never disappear, and it will remain difficult to recruit new teachers.
Fundamentally, one day of strike action is not going to put the industrial pressure on the Crisafulli government that’s needed. They may budge on some things, but that won’t be enough to address the public education crisis created by successive governments, Labor and Liberal, for more than a decade.
Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek met with the union the day after the strike and has discussed adjusting his paltry offer. Will the union leaders accept a few crumbs? Years of neglect can’t be turned around in 24 hours. We need much more than the government is offering. To win it, we need to escalate the campaign.
