Victorian teachers to stop work
By Mary Merkenich
MELBOURNE — Victorian state school teachers will stop work on November 12 as part of a campaign for a certified agreement with the government. The Australian Education Union (AEU) is seeking additional resources for all state schools, salary justice, limiting of contract/fixed term employment and a long overdue improvement in work loads.
After years of cuts, closures and increased stress for teachers, there is an urgent need to rebuild and upgrade the state school system.
Many AEU members, however, are cynical about the union leadership's will to fight. After some six weeks of fruitless negotiations with the Department of Education, the union leaders called the stop-work meeting and nothing else until late February.
A group of rank and file teachers have met twice to discuss ways of making the campaign more effective. They are proposing that the campaign receive input and direction from rank and file teachers, be fought on a statewide basis and not left to individual schools, and that any deal be ratified by the rank and file.
Many other ideas were suggested. It was agreed that a very militant march through the city's streets after the November 12 stop-work was the least the union leadership could plan.
It was also agreed that the mass leafleting of train stations or other public venues, and picketing Parliament House, would help keep pressure on the government.
While membership support for the stop-work is crucial, it may be very difficult to mobilise AEU teachers. The union leadership's record of compromising on important questions, planning ineffective campaigns, and being more interested in their own positions than the job losses and erosion of conditions of the AEU membership have demoralised many members.
The victory in the officer elections in August of "New Direction", claiming to be more concerned with the "real" education issues and to be willing to fight, has not changed the leadership's reluctance.
New Direction consists mainly of people who were already part of the leadership, but in a smaller faction. In practice and strategy, there has been little difference between the two.
[Mary Merkenich is an AEU delegate.]