A major revolt, in which socialists have played a crucial role, has shaken one of the biggest union branches in the country. In this year’s campaign for a new Victorian Government Schools Agreement, Victorian school staff rejected, not one, but two, offers from the state Labor government, in defiance of our own union leaders. Australian Education Union (AEU) members have now agreed to a third, revised, offer, bringing this chapter of rebellion to a close.
Our defiance paid off. Each time we voted down an offer, the subsequent revised offer contained important improvements. These included pay rises for education support (ES) staff equal to those of teachers, having one less soul-crushing meeting per week after school, a promise to fund the work required for Disability Inclusion Profiles, a $2,000 pro-rata cash bonus (equivalent to back paying our first 3 percent pay rise to January for some workers), a 1 percent annual bonus for top-of-the-range staff and securing our previous reduction in face-to-face teaching hours into our agreement rather than a separate deed with an expiry date. The government has also felt obliged to commit publicly to properly funding schools according to the minimum standards in the Gonski plan.
Importantly, the government didn’t just offer us more because we voted no to its first two offers, but because tens of thousands joined the two statewide strikes and mass rallies to show we were serious about winning our demands. These incredible actions also refuted many of the arguments our union leaders used to de-escalate the campaign, including that there was no appetite for strikes. It also helped focus attention on the government’s failure to deliver necessary funding to schools and school staff, which was a major problem for a weak government.
But one of our most important wins has little to do with the detail of the concessions we’ve wrested from the government. It is that we have put rank-and-file revolt in support of real wage rises and workload relief back on the political map. In an all-too-rare example of the sort of action and organisation that is needed to revive and rebuild a decent union movement, our campaign is instructive and an inspiration to workers elsewhere and in other industries.
The timid, class-collaborationist approach of our union leaders, which the campaign by Victorian school staff stands in sharp contrast to, is a major factor in the long-term decline of real wages, a trend that economist Greg Jericho has pointed out has gone alongside robust corporate profits.
In Victoria, Labor has colluded with our union leaders to keep workers’ expectations low. The AEU is no exception. When the AEU leaders agreed to Labor’s offer in May, which would have left education support staff with significantly lower pay rises than teachers and delivered no meaningful improvements to conditions, they parroted the government’s own spin and scaremongering to justify their capitulation.
The union leadership called a strike for 24 March this year. The response was enormous, with more than 35,000 school staff and supporters jamming the streets of central Melbourne. But rather than build on this, the union’s leaders immediately declared that there was no point trying to get the government to budge from its existing position. We were told that the same government that’s spending $1.6 billion on enforcing “Australia’s toughest bail laws” and more than $60 million annually on handouts to fossil fuel companies, according to research by the Australia Institute, couldn’t afford to invest more in our schools and educators.
They even used the government’s neglect of public education and the resulting staffing shortage, to argue it wasn’t possible to address our burnout-inducing workloads with phased-in reductions to class sizes or face-to-face teaching hours. This is despite there being 34,000 registered teachers not currently working in schools, according to the education department’s 2024 Teacher Workforce Snapshot, many of whom will likely return only once workloads are reduced.
Rather than mobilise members in a serious campaign of strikes to pressure the government to concede our demands, the AEU leaders accepted the government’s position and pressured members to abandon ours. When making excuses for the government didn’t work, they fell back on scaremongering about the potential for arbitration or the possibility of a Liberal and One Nation coalition government coming to power in the state election in November. Never mind that these became possible eventualities only after we lost months of our campaign due to AEU leaders cancelling our rolling regional strikes in April in an act of “good will” to the government.
What our union leaders likely saw as “pragmatism”, the majority of AEU members rejected for what it really was: blackmailing school staff into accepting less than what we need and deserve. By rejecting the lies of our leaders along with the government’s offers, and winning improvements that they’d told us were impossible, we’ve shown that what really stands between workers and winning more than crumbs from our employers isn’t the intransigence of our bosses or a lack of willingness on behalf of members to fight for more. It’s our do-nothing leaders, who are more concerned with maintaining their comfortable seats at the table and future career prospects in the Labor Party than they are with delivering serious gains for their members.
This year’s enterprise bargaining was scripted to be a victory lap for Labor. A quick resolution would allow the government to pretend that the crisis-level workloads and criminal underfunding of our schools were on the way to being fixed. Instead, our rejection of two government offers meant that for half the year, the crisis in our schools and the revolt of school staff against our own union leadership were all over the news. And importantly, our second Vote No victory meant that the union leaders followed through with another massive strike in July. All of this is an important platform for the future.
An important part of why school staff were prepared to push back this year was our simmering anger over the last agreement, struck in 2022, which failed to make a serious dent in our spiralling workloads and locked in a significant pay cut in real terms. For most teachers, wages went backwards by 11 percent—between $8,000 to $14,000 per year in real terms—as a result of the 2022 agreement. This abysmal deal came off the back of a series of other sub-par agreements, in a period where our union went thirteen years without a single strike.
But this pattern is hardly exceptional in the Australian union movement. So why did AEU members break it this time? Anger and demoralisation don’t necessarily lead to rank-and-file organising for something better. Indeed, thousands of school staff quit the union after the 2022 real-wages-cutting agreement was signed. The generally neglected state of public schools and the parlous conditions for support staff, who play an increasingly important role in schools, were important. As was the general unpopularity of the state government. But so too was the emergence of a combative socialist caucus offering a real alternative to the union leaders, which didn’t exist previously.
Socialists in Schools started as a group of Victorian Socialists members and supporters in the education unions committed to championing a kind of unionism that is the opposite of the top-down approach of the current leaders. Socialists know that a better world is possible only when workers fight for it collectively.
Knowing a different approach is necessary and possible is one thing; making it a reality requires boots on the ground. Socialists in Schools was helped by the pre-existing profile and membership of Victorian Socialists, built through the hard work of previous election campaigns, struggles and union activity. This laid the basis for a serious network of socialists in the AEU.
When the union leadership cancelled the rolling regional strikes in April, Socialists in Schools sprang into action, leading more than 50 “rebel schools” and seven regions to pass motions demanding more strikes and reiterating our commitment to fighting for our full demands, not watering them down, as our leaders were signalling they were prepared to do.
In response to the sub-par government offers pushed by the AEU leaders, we organised the Vote No Network, which connected with more than 600 angry school staff from Geelong to Gippsland and beyond. Our charts and explainers breaking down the problems of the offers and arguing that we could vote no and win more gave confidence to many members outside our ranks and helped raise expectations about what was possible.
We even invited AEU President Justin Mullaly to debate primary school teacher and Socialists in Schools member Ridah Hassan. When Mullaly didn’t show, we role-played how to refute the arguments that he and other members of the AEU executive had been making in support of the offers. When AEU leaders delayed calling a second strike after our rejection of the July offer, we helped the Keilor Downs College sub-branch organise a defiant rally of more than 120 members representing more than a dozen schools outside then Labor Education Minister—now Premier—Ben Carrol’s office to maintain our momentum. This was an important (and all-too rare) initiative, showing that sub branches could act on their own initiative rather than waiting for the officials to give a lead.
AEU leaders reacted to the revolt by attempting to shut down any space for democratic discussion or debate. Regional meetings were turned into AEU executive-dominated “briefings”. Mass members meetings were no longer included at our statewide strike days, breaking with decades of democratic tradition. We openly condemned these decisions and spoke up even when told it was “out of order”. For this, we were pilloried by union leaders and their supporters for our impoliteness, but welcomed and joined by many union members tired of the status quo.
Socialists are so often told that we need to put on a more conservative face to reach a wider audience. But our experience shows that defiant and uncompromising socialists can in fact connect with mass sentiment and gain favourable mainstream media coverage while we’re at it. Given the crisis of combativity in our unions and the broader crises of capitalism in our society, this is a very positive development.
Unfortunately, our campaign was always going to be limited by the still relatively small number of socialist rebels and the natural advantages enjoyed by the existing hostile union leaders. While we could help persuade members to vote down offers, we were not able to force the leaders to escalate the strike action. This meant that their tactics of delaying and scaremongering could eventually sap our momentum. And the relatively uncharted waters of the campaign likely meant many members felt more out on a limb by the third vote, and therefore were vulnerable to the union leaders’ arguments. In the end, 79 percent voted for the third offer.
Since the new agreement will not meaningfully deal with the workload crisis driving staff out of teaching in droves, and will likely bring wages for school staff only back to 2020 levels, this will probably be a temporary pause in what will prove to be a much longer struggle. Socialists have our work cut out for us, both in our union and beyond. We want to carry the momentum built up from this year’s revolt into winning better conditions at every school through the local consultative process and by winning leadership roles in our AEU sub-branches, regions and branch council elections next year. And we need to continue building Socialists in Schools, so that we can play an even more significant role in struggles of the future.
We have also taken our anger at Labor’s neglect of our schools and of working-class communities in general, as well as our concern about the prospect of a Liberal and One Nation coalition government, onto the doors and polling booths in the Victorian Socialists’ state election campaign. Socialists in Schools’ thirteen “rebel educator” candidates for Victorian Socialists are putting forward the kind of vision for our schools and society that our group has been fighting for in our union this year—one in which the needs of educators and workers are put before the profits of the rich and powerful.
While this year’s campaign hasn’t totally turned around the crisis in our schools and in our union, it has made some important progress in both areas. Through our rebellion, school staff have earned a few improvements that we wouldn’t have otherwise won, and a new generation of school staff have learned first-hand the power of refusing to accept the crumbs we’re offered and striking for more. We have forged a path that, hopefully, workers in other places and other industries now will be more likely to follow.
