The Australian Education Union (AEU), which covers more than 45,000 Victorian public school staff, is preparing for a statewide strike on 24 March in our campaign for a new agreement with the state government. It has been too long since Victorian public school staff have flooded the streets of Melbourne in our thousands, demonstrating our collective power. This is the union’s first strike in thirteen years—and it’s desperately needed.
School staff in the so-called “education state” are the lowest paid in Australia, and our schools are the worst funded, according to a Productivity Commission report from February. According to a Monash University report from 2024, only three in every ten staff want to stay in the profession until retirement. This comes as no surprise when, according to the same report, staff work an average of 12.5 additional unpaid hours each week.
Stressful workloads are combined with housing stress, as 43 percent of Victorian teaching positions are in a local government area where it is unaffordable for a graduate teacher to rent a one-bedroom property, according to research by the University of New South Wales. Our uncompetitive wages, which have been outpaced by inflation by around 11 percent since 2022, are also contributing to the staffing shortage. According to an AEU survey, 73 percent of principals experienced staffing shortages at their schools last year.
In response to this crisis, AEU members are demanding a 35 percent pay rise over three years. Given how far our wages have fallen behind the rising cost of living, pay is a top priority for most staff. Also included in our demands are a series of workload-reducing measures, for all provisions in the agreement to be fully funded, and paid lunch breaks and clear job descriptions for education support staff, who are paid poverty wages and frequently pressured by principals to perform duties outside of their roles.
The strike has been called as the state government has refused to make the union an offer after nine months of bargaining. This is not surprising given the Allan Labor government’s track record on public education. According to a report from the National School Resourcing Board, Labor denied Victorian public schools $2.1 billion in funding in 2023 alone. To make matters worse, they are denying our schools an additional $2.4 billion in funding by 2031. This is while already wealthy private schools continue to rake in public funds. According to data from the Commonwealth Department of Education, Victorian private schools were over-funded by around $95.2 million last year.
Labor has gotten away with these attacks without any real resistance from our union leaders. This is demonstrated most clearly by the union’s failure to take strike action since 2013. Despite Labor’s denigration of our schools and profession, the AEU has continued to mobilise its apparatus to campaign for the party at each election.
The AEU leadership’s approach culminated in the disastrous 2022 Victorian Government Schools Agreement. The union did not take strike action while negotiating the agreement, resulting in a deal that delivered pay cuts of around 11 percent in real terms, which is the equivalent of missing around 34 days of pay each year. In response to this betrayal, thousands of members left the union, eroding union density in Victorian schools.
That the union has kicked off our industrial campaign by calling a strike in the first term of the school year is a step in the right direction. The announcement of the strike has brought some life back into the union, with more than 2,500 school staff joining or rejoining since the start of the school year.
That the union leaders have taken a more oppositional approach to the government, at least in the initial stages of our campaign, shows that they are responding to the pressure from school staff frustrated by the last agreement and the overall neglect of our schools and profession. This demonstrates the importance of union members using every means at their disposal, such as regional meetings, branch conferences and elections to state council, to push for a more combative approach.
One strike day will not be enough to win our demands. The Allan government gave us a taste of its intransigence when it challenged our Protected Action Ballot Order at the start of this year—a brazen attempt to undermine teachers’ democratic rights. Despite projecting a budget surplus of $600 million, spending $1.6 billion on tougher bail laws and $290 million on fossil fuel subsidies since 2024, Labor claims the government is too broke to increase spending on public education.
We are in for a fight. That’s why Socialists in Schools, a group of members and supporters of Victorian Socialists in the AEU and other education unions, is campaigning for the AEU to call multiple strike days, including strikes, over consecutive days. This is the only way to force the state government to deliver. It took multiple strikes in 2021 and 2022 for teachers in New South Wales to briefly become the best paid in the country.
While pushing for more strikes is important, we also need to expand the ranks of socialists in our unions. Being a socialist means understanding that the collective power of workers—not the clever manoeuvring of official negotiators or the good will of Labor governments—is the solution to every problem, both inside and outside of our schools. Understanding this is the best defence against the moderate, Labor-oriented approach that has disarmed our unions in the face of repeated attacks.
It also means understanding that only by getting rid of capitalism can we meaningfully address the problems in our schools and in society more broadly. As long as our society is run by the rich and powerful, the needs of working-class people—including public education—will always take a back seat to the priorities of billionaires.
Socialists in Schools have produced a Strike Handbook to help school staff make the case for multiple strikes and fighting the government until we win. We are also hosting a “Strike School” at 4pm on Saturday, 14 March, at the Victorian Socialists Volunteer Centre, 83 Sydney Road, Brunswick.
