School staff cannot carry the burden of the broken public school system any longer. Our paltry pay and unbearable workloads deserve to be front-page news and a political crisis for the government. And in Victoria, right now, they are! This is thanks to an internal union rebellion in which the group Socialists in Schools played a crucial role.
Last week, 58 percent of Australian Education Union (AEU) members in Victoria made history. Going against our union leaders’ advice, tens of thousands of school staff voted down an in-principle agreement the union had reached with the state Labor government.
The rejection is historic. The first statewide agreement reached between the left-wing teachers’ union, the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association, was in 1982. Since then, rebellious school staff have never been organised or confident enough to win a majority of their workmates to vote against their own union leaders’ advice, to reject an agreement and demand more. Until now.
There are many reasons for the “no” vote. The disastrous 2022 agreement, which union leaders rammed through during the pandemic, resulted in an 11 percent pay cut. There is a lot of catching up to do, and the latest proposed agreement would not get us there. While the media was fixated on talking up the offer, for most teachers in the middle years of their career the agreement was not close enough to the 35 percent pay increase over three years that we voted to fight for at the beginning of the campaign. It’s also unclear whether the proposed pay deal would keep us ahead of current and recent inflation. We simply can’t afford another union sellout.
The question of solidarity with education support staff was also key to convincing people to vote “no”. ES staff perform essential work in schools, and the pay rise they were offered was lower than the percentage pay rise teachers were to receive. Rather than base salary increases, much of the pay rise for ES came in the weaker form of bonuses.
It’s important to remember just how low-paid ES staff are. Range 2-1 (entry level for the most common band) is currently $56,580, which works out to just $28.54 per hour. Most classroom support ES get paid for only six hours per day (and work through their unpaid 30-minute lunch break), so entry-level ES get paid just $846 for a five-day week. Even the top of range 2 (2-8) working those same hours are paid only $1,096.50 per week, before tax. And yes, this is the top pay for most classroom support ES. As the union leaders themselves argue, we are “stronger together”—and 58 percent of us demonstrated this by rejecting a deal that would have left ES base pay even further behind teachers, and thus drive another wedge between us.
Finally, the offer did nothing to address our impossible workloads, which are pushing 38 teachers per week to leave the profession, or the state to teach elsewhere. Recent research has indicated that less than one in three mid-career teachers plan to stay in the profession until retirement.
In response to the union leaders’ fearmongering that rejecting the deal would lead to an intractable campaign and a worse offer, Socialists in Schools activists cited the example of Victorian nurses who voted down an offer that their leadership had endorsed in 2024. Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation officials were completely unprepared for the anger and confidence of nurses to speak up against their proposed deal at a mass meeting. At the time, rather than hear out their members, union Secretary Lisa Fitzpatrick condescendingly told nurses that they clearly “hadn’t been able to grasp” the wage deal. In reality, members understood perfectly that they were being ripped off. They stood their ground, voted no, and received an improved offer merely a month later.
The AEU leaders similarly disregard their own members’ opinions. They ignored motions from 54 schools and 6 regions to escalate our campaign with more industrial action. Instead, they implemented largely toothless “work bans” and cancelled the half-day, regional strikes they organised. Those strikes were themselves a de-escalation from our previous statewide 24-hour stop-work, despite being dishonestly branded as an “escalation”. Going above and beyond, the union leaders also deleted critical social media comments and banned dissenting union members from the union’s channels.
The union presented us with a low-ball offer, presumably out of deference to the Labor government. This is a government that talked enthusiastically about “essential workers” during the pandemic but has deliberately let our wages fall far behind inflation, and has constantly skimmed funding from public schools, leading to the crisis we see today. How dare our unions accept these insulting “offers” from one of the best-funded employers and one that we are well placed to put under serious pressure?
Interestingly, following the vote, our officials tried a different tack. Speaking to the media, a red-faced Justin Mulally, the union president, initially tried to distance himself from the offer and claimed that he and the union had not endorsed or recommended the deal to its members. Mullaly stated that the union’s supposedly democratic decision-making body, the branch council, was responsible. But the branch council was elected in 2024, well before the campaign started, and is largely made up of members allied with the leadership, and who follow their lead. And Mullaly’s statement that the union hadn’t recommended it is an outright lie—as demonstrated by the torrent of one-sided emails, social media content, and countless one-sided lectures in union meetings about why we should accept the deal, while describing any counterargument as “misinformation”.
So, Mullaly sells out workers and lies to us, to the media and to the wider community in the process. Ticking all these boxes, he would make a great Labor Party politician one day.
We should not view the calcified branch council as the key to the future of public education, but rather the rank-and-file union members everywhere who know better.
The role of Socialists in Schools
Socialists in Schools, a campaign group within the union, played a decisive role in activating more radical union members to build and win the “no” campaign. We produced materials for AEU members to take to their schools to educate others about why it’s right to have high expectations and maintain our demands, and why the only way to win was through a militant industrial campaign.
Before the 24 March strike, our Strike zine tackled a series of questions we thought needed addressing, from “Do strikes work?” for the many members who had no experience striking due to the union’s inaction for many years, to “Can the government afford to pay us?”, given the media’s beat up about the state government being broke. Later in the campaign, we responded to common arguments and fearmongering from union leaders against further strike action and voting “no” in our campaign FAQ, such as “Will we be starting from scratch if we vote no?”, “Are we going to be forced into arbitration?” and “Do we need to accept a deal so we don’t have to risk bargaining with the Liberals or One Nation following the state election?”
When calling through the hundreds of school staff who left their details with the “Vote No network”, many said they had already printed these documents and distributed them at their school or used them to decorate their union noticeboards. This material was extremely effective, because the union’s materials were deliberately unclear. Members had questions that the officials just would not hear out or answer adequately.
In addition to speaking at regional and online briefings, officials visited many schools to spruik their offer. It was a joy to hear that at many of these sub-branch meetings, teachers and ES stood up to the officials and, at times, even walked out on them. One official went so far as to describe as “feral” a school in the eastern suburbs where a Socialists in Schools member helps to lead the sub-branch. Long live the feral schools.
We are immensely proud that our materials found their way into countless staffrooms and helped frustrated union members everywhere stand up for themselves, knowing they were not alone. This is extremely important in a union that deliberately silos members and schools off from one another.
Socialists in Schools hosted multiple meetings online and in person, with some between 70 and 150 union members. It’s now an active campaign with dozens of impressive union militants. We have discussed a socialist approach to schooling and education, built our school’s sub-branches, faced off with the officials, produced vital social media content and resources for union activists, and fought for a set of politics in the union to counter the conservative, defeatist approach of the AEU leaders.
Towards the end of the campaign, we received messages from dozens of union members giving us information about their school’s vote. Before the official results were announced, we had collected voting data for nearly 200 school sub-branches. Many of these messages included anecdotes about how their schools fared—sharing surprise at how many at their school voted no, frustration at the lack of democracy in the union’s process and asking us for advice, or disappointment in the result at their own school but hoping for a better result overall.
We thank everyone who sent us these messages and made connections during the campaign, and we urge everyone to stay in touch and get involved. Unlike the opaque leadership, we aimed to share results from the “no” voting schools—both primary and secondary, metropolitan and regional—to give others the confidence to do the same.
The next stage of the campaign
We are aware of the challenges ahead. The government says it is in no rush to resume negotiations with the union, and the latest union email indicates that the leadership will continue to waste our time and energy with an unnecessary survey, so they will have more of our opinions to ignore.
We don’t need a survey. We know the problems and their solutions. Socialists in Schools is calling for all the “no” voting schools and AEU members to pass motions demanding the union restart our industrial campaign and organise a strike for the first few weeks of term three. This is going to be an uphill battle. But our determined campaign has kept open a door the officials wanted to slam shut—we must be determined over the next few weeks to make the most out of this opportunity.
Despite the many challenges ahead, it is worth reflecting and celebrating what a significant win our side has achieved. For decades, union officials in every industry have normalised conservative ideas in the workers’ movement: unions are not about organising our side of the class struggle but are about service provision and individual protection. We can’t have strikes because members are too passive and conservative. They also developed undemocratic structures to protect their own power and ensure workers had no way to organise against them or challenge their arguments.
The “no” vote in the AEU is an example of the opposite orientation. We did not passively accept the arguments of our union leaders; we educated ourselves, argued to others and passed motions to express our opposition to the sellout. We went from office to office arguing with our coworkers, attended regional meetings, swapped numbers with activists at other schools, and forced discussion and debate everywhere to find critical members of the union to get active.
We didn’t accept the bureaucratic and stifling meeting rules and used every avenue open to us to argue our points. We also didn’t shy away from identifying as socialists, but connected our campaign to the question of capitalism, inequality and other injustices like racism and war. All of this was to create a network of socialist union activists who could make coherent arguments across the school system.
On an average day, the words you might use to describe working in education would include “exhausting” or “demoralising”. Today, it’s exciting and inspiring. Teachers and ES should hold their heads up high for the historic stand we have taken, and the example we have set for the rest of the union movement.
Officials everywhere should be sweating, and unionists everywhere should take heart. Despite the lies and fearmongering of our so-called representatives, when a clear lead is given, it’s possible for socialists to win a wider audience, to reject the passivity and low horizons our union leaders set, and keep open the possibility of a fight for something more.
