BY MARY MERKENICH & NORRIAN RUNDLE
Victorian teachers have been sold out again by their union, following its decision to abandon a campaign for increased schools funding in the state budget.
The Australian Education Union had called a stopwork meeting for June 19 in response to the May state budget, but backed down and cancelled it on June 8. The budget, which was $509 million dollars in surplus, did very little to repair the damage done to schools under the former Kennett government.
The AEU had threatened the strike action unless five demands were met:
In arguing that the AEU's council should call off the stopwork, the union's Victorian president, Mary Bluett, argued that the union had achieved "an historic win", because teachers were now "stakeholders" in negotiations with Steve Bracks' Labor government about funding to state schools. Only one councillor voted against the motion.
The "historic win" was a government agreement to talk with the AEU and allow it to participate in discussions on short-, medium- and long-term goals to secure the future of public education. These would be considered as part of the next budget process — in May next year.
Writing in the June 23 Age, staff writer Ewin Hannan commented, "The teachers' union has put on a brave face over its backdown this week" and "Mary Bluett ... released a carefully worded statement that, despite a good attempt at political spin, showed the union had got little from the government".
The budget campaign came hot on the heels of another of Bluett's "wins" — an agreement last year between the AEU and the Bracks government about teacher workload.
While it was supposed to deliver lower teaching hours and smaller class sizes for primary and secondary teachers, it didn't mandate such a result. Instead implementation was put back on school-based union sub-branches to negotiate with principals.
The union estimated that secondary schools needed 700-900 new teachers across the state to meet the agreement. This was not provided for in the budget.
The agreement has been a disaster in secondary schools. Most AEU sub-branches felt that they had no choice but to maintain programs at the expense of increased workload. An AEU survey revealed that, of the 74 secondary schools that replied, only 21% had fully implemented the agreement.
The two pivotal parts of the agreement, class sizes and teaching hours, have shown little improvement under the Bracks Labor government.
In secondary schools, teaching time has decreased from a weekly average of 23.69 teaching periods (of 48 minutes) to 23.38, and class sizes have fallen from an average of 22.7 in 1997 to 22.6 students in 2001. These are hardly significant gains, especially given that, in 1992, teaching loads were 21 periods and average class sizes were 20.8 students.
Given the failure of this agreement, teachers were understandably cynical about the union's commitment to the budget campaign.
This could have been counteracted if the June 19 stopwork had been clearly motivated by the leadership and members had been adequately informed about negotiations or involved in the development of the campaign, but they were not.
Thus by June 8, it was clear that many teachers were going to ignore the call to strike.
The mood was different amongst kindergarten teachers, who are furious about the government's indifference to their justified demands for salary parity. Kindergarten teachers earn 80% of primary teachers' pay, although they are qualified to teach years prep to two in primary schools. Many kindergartens had mustered the support of parents and were gearing up for the June 19 action.
Many union activists feared that the June 19 stopwork was not going to be very successful, and were concerned that the membership had not been involved in developing the campaign.
There was no meeting of the membership called for the day of the stopwork — probably because the leadership was not prepared to face the membership's anger over the lack of implementation of the agreement, especially in secondary schools.
But union activists' response was not to call for the abandonment of the campaign, but rather to organise an open membership meeting for the day of the planned stopwork, June 19, hoping to convince the AEU leadership to call a stopwork meeting themselves. Bluett was invited to attend and all branches asked to send representatives.
Despite the decision to call off the stopwork (and attempts to deny us a venue), about 30 teachers from the primary, secondary and pre-school sectors attended. Bluett did not.
The June 19 members' meeting rejected Bluett's view of the "victory" and decided that it was important to involve as many members as possible in planning a campaign around the five original demands. Unionists also decided to continue to meet and called on Bluett and other members of the union leadership to attend.
Activists believe that the union is falling apart and that the continuance of the leadership's current strategy will only advance this unravelling. There is deep demoralisation in many schools and many AEU sub-branches do not operate at all.
Another indication of the state of the AEU is the participation of rank and file members at the AEU's upcoming state conference. Reliable sources have stated that only 10 rank and file members will be attending the annual conference representing over 1400 schools and 1500 kindergartens.
The next open membership meeting is on July 25 at the AEU offices.
[Mary Merkenich and Norrian Rundle are both teachers and activists in the Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union.]