By Noel Towell
The teachers’ union has raised the spectre of strike action for the first time in a decade in pursuit of a pay demand of up to 14 per cent for 52,000 Victorian government school educators.
The Australian Education Union (AEU) is under new leadership, and spoiling for a confrontation with the state Labor government over what it says is a crisis in schools.
Widespread anger and high-profile resignations from the AEU followed the last pay deal – worth just 2 per cent – in 2022, and a group of unionists running on a “strike now” ticket pulled in 37 per cent of the vote in internal elections late last year.
Justin Mullaly, head of the Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union, says teachers are fired up.Credit: Alex Coppel
Union membership had dwindled from about 48,000 in 2018 to less than 42,000 at October’s branch elections, when veteran AEU official Justin Mullaly won the state branch presidency after the long-serving Meredith Peace stepped down.
But Mullaly says the numbers have recovered by “several thousand” as the union prepares for pay talks with the state government in coming months, and that the state’s teachers are fired up, pointing to the large number of educators wanting a say on the wage claim to be delivered to Education Minister Ben Carroll in late July.
Victorian graduate teachers are the worst paid in the country, earning $13,000 less than the country’s best-paid graduates in the Northern Territory and $8700 less than those in NSW. Mullaly says a “significant pay rise” is needed just to achieve parity.
“We think Victorian teachers are worth at least as much as a similar teacher in New South Wales, and by 2026 we need a 13 to 14 per cent pay increase, just to get to them,” he says.
But the crisis in the profession is not just about the money; chronic staff shortages in state schools have forced teachers to take up increasingly heavy workloads.
“Where people feel a lot of pressure is where there’s massive shortage, and governments do a really good job of not talking about that, but there is no school in the state that’s not affected,” Mullaly says.
The branch president says the salary issue is directly linked to the short-staffing crisis, and that a significant pay rise will attract more graduates and bring teachers who left the profession back into the fold.
Mullaly has made it clear that a strike at the state’s 1570 government schools is on the table if the government does not offer an acceptable pay deal.
“The platform that I ran on it was explicitly clear that we needed to engage in an industrial campaign if that’s what it took to get a fair deal,” Mullaly says.
A key strategy in such a campaign, Mullaly says, is enlisting parents as allies.
“Parents understand the job that teachers have has become more complex, and that recognition, making sure teachers are remunerated well enough so they can manage, I think parents understand that means that their children and young people are going to get access to a higher quality education,” he says.
The state government has struggled recently with restive public sector workforces, settling a bitter industrial dispute with its police force in February. After a vote of no-confidence from officers, then-chief commissioner Shane Patton left the top job.
Teaching union members have also taken note of the last round of bargaining for the state’s nurses, who dramatically rejected a deal brokered between their union’s leadership and the state government last year, eventually winning a 28 per cent pay rise over four years.
High school teacher Lucy Honan, who challenged for the union branch presidency last year on a vow to “strike against the crisis” and won 37 per cent of the vote, says the leadership has picked up on the “enthusiasm to fight” among the rank-and-file, who are “desperate and angry”.
“They’ve read the mood, and I think they’d read it even before the election,” Honan says.
“People want the union to fight, and we know that people are coming back into the union to fight.”
“There is a strong sense that we need to fight the Labor government, that there can’t be any cozy settlements, and that we will fight them just as hard as we will fight a Liberal government.”
Carroll says he too believes that Victorian teachers deserve to be paid on par with their interstate counterparts.
“I do believe our teachers are some of the most hardworking, talented in the nation. And I do believe they should have competitive wages with their interstate counterparts,” the minister says.
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