Victorian teachers demand dignity, but won’t get it without a fight
Public school staff in the Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union (AEU) have been gathering at regional log of claims meetings across the state to discuss the changes we want to see in the Victorian Government Schools Agreement (VGSA), which determines our pay and conditions over the next few years.
We desperately need a better VGSA. Our last agreement, which was narrowly voted up despite considerable pushback from members, has left us worse off. Our real wages have fallen by 11 percent, which means graduate teachers are paid $8,489 less per year ($162 per week) than if our pay had kept up with inflation. Starting teacher salaries in Victoria are now the lowest in Australia, and almost $10,000 behind those in New South Wales.
Our current agreement’s modest reduction in face-to-face teaching hours has failed to put a serious dent in our unmanageable workloads. According to a Monash University report, staff are still working a staggering 12.5 unpaid hours each week on average.
Union members are sick and tired of our profession being undervalued. That’s why, in log of claims meetings, we’re voting for ambitious claims that put forward a positive vision for what our jobs and our schools could be.
A top priority for members is a big pay rise to win back the value we’ve lost under the current agreement, and then future pay rises that bring our wages into line with similar professions. Some regions are pushing for an immediate 30 percent boost followed by 5 percent every six months, for a total of around 60 percent over the life of the agreement. We also want retention payments that help keep our most experienced teachers in the job.
Many of the other claims are about addressing our crushing workloads. These include requiring at least one education support (ES) staff in every classroom, additional staff to assist with teachers’ administrative tasks, a limit on meetings to one hour per week, a hard limit on class sizes at 18 students, a reduction in face-to-face teaching hours to 17 in the first year and 16 in the second, and nine professional practice days each year (two for report writing, two at the start of the year for set-up, four for whole school professional learning and one to complete compulsory online units).
For ES staff, there is the claim (left out of the last agreement) for paid lunch breaks, one hour of self-directed preparation time each day for classroom support ES and four professional practice days each year. There are also claims to clarify the different ES roles and to make progression more streamlined, as it is for teachers.
These claims, if won, would completely transform our jobs and our schools. Staff would get the support and time we need to do our jobs and meet the complex needs of our students. We’d be paid at a rate that means we are better able to cope with the rising cost of living. And this would help ensure vacancies are filled, particularly in working-class, outer-suburban schools, which currently struggle to attract staff.
Claims approved by regional union meetings now go to the union’s state conference in early August for discussion and approval, ahead of the expiry of the current agreement at the end of this year. We know from experience that these changes will not come easily. Our last log of claims in 2021 included a series of commendable claims, but there was no strike action to pressure the government into accepting them. The result was an agreement that has left us significantly worse off on pay and did very little on workload, and which because of this has failed to solve the crisis of teacher retention.
We can expect the Victorian government to resist our demands again. Recent revelations in the Age show that the government is withholding almost $3 billion in funding that it previously promised our schools. It will likely use supposed budgetary constraints to claim that “the money isn’t there” for our demands.
But the money is there. Around $1.6 billion of it is going to “back in Victoria’s new bail laws” with new and expanded prisons, presumably to deal with those falling through the cracks in our decaying education system. The new $1.19 billion prison in Lara, the Western Correctional Facility, will offer sign-on bonuses of $8,000 to draw in new staff.
The money is there, but what’s in poor supply is the political will to use it to fund schools. That means union members need to take matters into our own hands. We need meetings at all our schools to establish our minimum expectations or “red lines”, and if those claims are not included in any proposed offer, we will vote “no” and fight for something better.
Victorian nurses received their 28.4 percent pay rise only by voting “no” to an initial offer of 12 percent. Though their industrial campaign was brief, the fact that nurses had already shut down hospital beds and surgeries, coupled with their high-profile rejection of the proposed settlement, created a plausible threat of a major, politically damaging industrial dispute for the state government. This was enough to eventually win an improved offer. Teachers in New South Wales went on a series of strikes in 2021-22, eventually winning an immediate pay rise of almost $10,000.
Where workers have refused to be pressured into accepting sub-par offers and have struck for something better, they have been successful. To win anything close to our ambitious demands, it’s highly likely we will need to do the same.
The AEU has called a protest outside Victorian Education Minister Ben Carroll’s electorate office in Keilor at 4:15pm on Thursday 19 June. Join us in demanding the state government keep their promise to fund our schools.
