“On the day of my mother’s funeral, I went home and wrote reports”, Kate says. She’s a public high school teacher and, along with 50,000 others, many also from Catholic schools, she’s striking to demand better pay and reduced workloads from the New South Wales government.
“I am working two to three hours a night on top of what I do in a day, and that’s probably less than average for teachers”, says another public high school teacher, also called Kate.
Teachers are burdened with mountains of administrative work beyond their key responsibility of teaching and learning. This is the third public school strike, and the second for Catholic teachers, in seven months.
“Our primary job is to teach, not do admin. We are doing [Education Minister] Sarah Mitchell’s job”, says Jen, who’s attended all the strike rallies of the campaign so far. The Kates nod in agreement.
Staff shortages, compounded by sickness due to COVID and the flu, are resulting in hundreds of classes being merged daily across the state. Students are then being supervised instead of receiving lessons. 
“All this squeezing is actually squeezing people out of the profession”, says Mark, who teaches in the public sector. “It is emotionally, physically and spiritually unsustainable. It hurts me to see my colleagues work to exhaustion.”
Catholic and public sector teachers are striking together for the first time in 25 years. Thousands wearing yellow Independent Education Union shirts have joined the public school teachers decked out in Teachers Federation red in front of the state parliament. 
Catholic school teachers’ pay is pegged to the public sector teachers’, making joint action an important step to increase the pressure on the government to meet the union’s demands.
Pay has become an increasingly prominent part of the campaign for both unions. The government has offered a measly 3 percent per year increase—a real wage cut—and has no intention to address teacher shortages.
“Teachers are not doing this as a joke, this is bread and butter for us, we can’t get a loan at the bank”, Jen says.
“We want remuneration at the rate of the work we do”, says Brenda, who works in a special needs school in the Catholic system. “We deserve recognition of the work we do for society and future generations.”
The government says that it will introduce performance pay to “reward” teachers for increased productivity. There’s disgust at the suggestion. When Teachers Federation President Angelo Gavrielatos mentions performance pay from the front of the rally, teachers jeer and boo.
“Teachers are performing above and beyond the call of duty every single day. They’re just not paid for it”, Gavrielatos says.
Workers from across the public sector have been on strike in recent weeks. On Tuesday, nurses and midwives called stoppages to attend a mass members meeting, which voted to raise the union wage claim to 7 percent per year. Public servants also took 24-hour strike action earlier in June.
An annual wage cap of 2.5 percent (now lifted to 3 percent) has been imposed on public sector workers since 2011, a restriction that unions are challenging. Joint industrial action between public sector unions would put real pressure on the government to abolish the cap entirely. 
“Teachers, like all workers, need to be involved in all kinds of industrial action and cause the maximum of pain to government and employers”, another teacher says. “Don’t rely on the government to give it to you. Use your industrial might and your power to get any measure of wage justice. Right now, wages are well below the cost of living. It’s only by being united we can take action.”
Despite the exhaustion, there is still determination among teachers at the rally to keep striking for our demands. Jen has no doubt this is the way forward. She’s been a member of the union and a teacher for long enough to know the government isn’t on our side.
“By striking we are showing the future generation that this is the way to go”, she says. “You have to fight for it.”

A New South Wales Teachers Federation member

NSW teachers strike to end pay cap

The first major teachers’ strike in NSW for ten years is set to go ahead on 7 December. All indications are that it will be well supported among the Teachers Federation’s 60,000 plus members and bring widespread stoppage to schools across the state. 
Support for the strike is overwhelming among teachers and there is a mood that now is the time to fight. The enthusiasm for the strike reflects the growing anger teachers feel about a range of issues, especially increasing workloads and stagnant pay. 
The strike will take place after ten years in which teachers’ pay rises have been capped at a maximum of 2.5 percent per year—meaning that wages have stood still since 2011. 
It comes after the Gallup enquiry, commissioned by the NSW Teachers Federation earlier this year, reported that there is a crisis in teacher numbers and morale that will only get worse unless it is arrested by more time for preparation and immediate action to stop the growing gap between teachers’ pay and that of other graduate professions.
It also comes after nearly two years in which teachers have had to adjust rapidly to online learning due to COVID outbreaks—and then be sent back into unsafe schools after being told that opening windows and switching on fans is good enough ventilation. 
One teacher in western Sydney told Red Flag that she is sick of the workload “forcing us to choose between the job we love and our families”, a reflection of the Gallup inquiry findings that teachers work 55 hours a week on average. She added, “We need fairer conditions and wages that reflect the consistent hard work and commitment we put into the job to support our students”.
Many teachers are fed up with the government ignoring the growing teacher shortage crisis hitting schools across the state, leading to more cover lessons and merged classes. 
Bullish statements from Premier Dominic Perrottet and Education Minister Sarah Mitchell indicate that there is a fight on our hands. If we are to win reduced hours and the Gallup recommended pay increase of between 10 and 15 percent, we will need further sustained strike action in the new year. 
“This will be the first strike in a decade and, quite frankly, it should be the first of many until the department recognises that the system is broken”, a teacher in Sydney’s north told Red Flag. 
“How dare Sarah Mitchell accuse us of planning to ‘abandon our students’ by striking for one day when it is government inaction that is forcing teachers to leave the profession in droves. This is not a case of cynical teachers throwing their toys out of the cot because they cannot get a pay rise. We should strike for as many times as that message is clearly understood.”

NSW teachers strike should pave the way for further action 

Fury is increasing among students, families and school staff in New South Wales over the government’s plan for Year 12 students and their teachers to return to school while the coronavirus outbreak remains out of control. 
Many are dumbfounded that students and staff will be forced on 16 August into poorly ventilated school buildings for revision and trial exams. The announcement came as the government also revealed that 25 percent of active COVID-19 cases in Greater Sydney are aged nineteen or under, despite most not being in school for the last five or six weeks. That’s more than 560 young people—a number that is growing every day.
The overwhelming majority of Year 12 students will be unvaccinated. So will most of the teachers and other staff. All 19,000 students from the eight most COVID affected Sydney local government areas will receive their first jab from 9 August, but they can expect 35 percent protection from symptomatic infection, according to research from Public Health England, where living with the Delta virus has caused a spike in hospitalisations and deaths. And even that limited protection will not kick in until a week after the return to school. For the other 51,000 students, there will be no vaccination at all.
Scant protection also awaits the thousands of school staff scrambling to get a dose of either AstraZeneca or Pfizer in the next few days—which is especially galling because many have been on vaccination waiting lists for weeks or months and were denied the “essential worker” status their unions campaigned for. 
No alternative to attending school has been announced for staff with medical conditions that make them more vulnerable, nor for those with unvaccinated children or family members, nor for those caring for their vulnerable elderly relatives, nor for pregnant teachers who have been advised not to get vaccinated yet.
In little more than two weeks, thousands of students and staff every day will travel across Sydney, many using public transport, to sit in their poorly ventilated classrooms adhering to hastily constructed “COVID safe” plans—which are, bizarrely, still based on the 1.5 metre rule for social distancing, a measure wholly inadequate against a strain that some studies suggest leads to 1,000 times more particles in patients’ airways than the Wuhan strain. 
“This will expose students, teachers and families to increased risks of infection and transmission”, Australian Medical Association President Omar Khorshid and AMA NSW President Danielle McMullen said in a 30 July media release calling for tighter lockdown restrictions generally and for the state government to scrap its return to school plan.
Cynical posturing about concerns for people’s mental health has been a feature of the state government’s defence of the increasingly derided scheme. But the hypocrisy of the Liberals claiming to be the champions for the education of students in the most COVID affected areas takes the cake. More than a year after the first nationwide lockdown exposed the digital divide between rich and poor students, there are thousands of students, concentrated especially in western and south-western Sydney, who live in overcrowded conditions and still do not have their own laptops or reliable internet access. 
More broadly, the number of demountable schools in NSW public schools increased by 45 percent between 2014 and 2020 while capital funding for private schools increased tenfold from $11.7 million a year in 2014/15 to $125 million a year on average now, according to research published by the New South Wales Teachers Federation last November. 
Yet opponents of the return to school plan are the ones accused of not caring about students. For the record, social media is alight with Year 12 students raging at the prioritisation of exams over their health. As one signatory to a petition launched by sixteen Year 12 students put it last week, “Life is worth more than the HSC”. 
There are many safe alternatives to trials and on-site exams. Education Minister Sarah Mitchell need only read student HSC Facebook pages to find some creative ideas. ACT schools manage to graduate students every year without final exams, for example.
NSW schools are awash with evidence about the attainment of this year’s group of Year 12s—many have completed five or six formal assessments over the past eighteen months. Their teachers know how they’re progressing through the syllabus and can be trusted to assess their performance. Moderation procedures would be straightforward to establish and a whole lot safer than sending thousands travelling across the city while the virus continues to spread. 
Teachers struggle with lockdowns as much as anyone. We prefer face-to-face teaching because interacting with students is the best part of the job and learning is best done in an interactive way. But the loss of a few months now is a small price to pay compared to hospitalisations and deaths of colleagues, students and their families, or the health consequences for the one in five victims who will end up with so-called long COVID.
The simple truth is that Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Health Minister Brad Hazzard want to use our young people and school staff as guinea pigs. They want a test case to give them information about how soon they can lift lockdown restrictions. It will be down to teachers, students and families to stop them. 
It can be done. Teachers and parents in the United Kingdom led a magnificent fight to stop schools reopening in January. Groups such as Parents for a Safe Return campaigned against the lies that young people were unlikely to become seriously ill with COVID-19. The biggest union representing school staff galvanised its membership to resist the Tory government’s premature reopening. More than 400,000 people watched or participated in a mass online union meeting where it was agreed to resist the unsafe return. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was forced to back down and schools remained closed for at least six weeks.
The New South Wales Teachers Federation and the Independent Education Union NSW should do likewise. We need a union-led campaign against the reopening. And we need it now.

NSW teachers strike to end pay cap

NSW teachers strike should pave the way for further action

We must resist the NSW government’s return to school plan

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