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WSWS : News & Analysis : Australia & South Pacific

Australia: Teachers union calls strike in bid to regain credibility

By Erika Zimmer
11 September 2003

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In the face of an escalating series of government attacks on public education in Australia, teachers’ union leaders in the state of New South Wales have proposed a one-day strike on September 17. But the action will be confined to the single issue of salaries.

Seeking to restore its credibility in the eyes of teachers by promoting a “militant” image, the union has coordinated the statewide strike with its counterparts in Victoria and Western Australia in what is being billed as an Australian Education Union “national day of action” over teachers’ wages.

By calling the industrial action, the union hopes to divert attention from the shameful role it has played over the past period in forcing public school teachers to accept the state Labor government’s new “flexible” conditions in order to compete with increasingly-subsidised private schools.

At July 29 stop-work meetings, reportedly the best attended in a decade, NSW Teachers Federation members overwhelmingly rejected the Carr government’s 3 percent per year pay offer and endorsed the union’s recommendation for a one-day strike to demand a 25 percent rise over two years.

The 25 percent claim, hailed by the union as a “major breakthrough on teachers’ salaries,” would hardly begin to reverse decades of salaries decline. By its own admission, teachers’ wages have fallen behind by 21 percent over the past five years alone. Moreover, by placing the salary claim in the hands of the Industrial Relations Commission, the union has signalled its readiness to strike a deal with the government over the next teachers’ industrial award, due to commence in January 2004.

Nevertheless, the size of the claim represents a bid by the union to regain some standing with teachers who, along with parents and students, have become increasingly disillusioned by the union’s refusal to mount any serious struggle against the running down of public education.

Addressing the July 29 meetings, union president Maree O’Halloran attempted to bolster the union’s credentials by declaring that this time the salaries campaign would not be used to attack teachers’ conditions. There would be no “award stripping,” O’Halloran insisted. “Everything will be maintained.”

O’Halloran’s remarks were revealing because they recalled the working conditions lost in the last bitterly-fought award campaign three years ago, when the union directly assisted the government to impose its demands.

In late 1999, after more than a decade of federal and state governments transferring funds to private schools, the Carr government seized upon declining public school enrolments to declare that the survival of NSW public education depended on it becoming more “competitive in the education market place”.

The government’s 2000 award called for the extension of the working day, allowing some teachers to be required to work anytime from 7.30 a.m. to 5 p.m. It imposed the concept of “portability,” permitting teachers to be directed to work in a number of different schools. It also introduced the category of “temporary” teachers, undermining security of employment.

The government’s agenda sparked intense opposition, resulting in the largest teachers’ rally for more than a decade. But eventually, after the better part of a year, the union managed to push through the government’s main demands, in return for small pay increases.

The union was further discredited in March 2001 when it did little to fight the Carr government’s plan to shut down 10 Sydney schools. No statewide campaign was organised and parents and teachers were left to combat the closure of each school on their own. As a sop to rising discontent, the union then sponsored a public inquiry, headed by former social work professor Tony Vinson, into the declining state of the public school system.

In his report, released last year, Vinson concluded that successive state and federal governments had severely eroded public education, while providing substantial funding increases to private schools, which mostly catered to the wealthiest families. This policy, he wrote, had produced a “dramatic” socio-economic divide. In particular, the NSW public school system had come to a “crossroad.” Without additional funding, public education would be “confirmed in the role of being a residual system for those who cannot afford something better”.

Despite the wide-ranging character of his findings, Vinson’s recommendations were minimal. He proposed a paltry $318 million funding boost in the state budget, just to bring NSW up to the national average for the level of education spending. The amount would not even begin to restore the funding that schools had lost—close to $1 billion over the past two decades—let alone provide a decent public education for every child.

The union promoted Vinson’s report in the lead up to this year’s state election in March as a means of reversing the decline in public education. But with the election barely out of the way, the Carr government resumed its offensive.

In the June 2003 state budget, private schools received a 4.4 percent funding hike while public schools were allocated just a 1.2 percent increase. Technical and Further Education (TAFE) fees were sent skyrocketing, in some cases by up to 300 percent, affecting mainly working class students. The education department was directed to cut up to 1,000 jobs as part of a major restructure.

The Labor government also demanded that public schools compete more aggressively with generously endowed private schools for their “share” of enrolments. To this end, NSW education officials have set up a new departmental unit, at a cost of $1.5 million, to ensure that, from 2004, each public school meets its enrolment target.

For all its claim to be leading “historic” industrial action on salaries, the union has restricted action over the 1,000 job cuts to the collection of signatures on a petition and left TAFE teachers to fight the fee increases on their own. It is insisting that in the current award campaign the only issue is salaries.

While the union is falsely claiming that teachers’ working conditions will be protected in the salaries campaign, the logic of competition requires unending cost-cutting and erosion of conditions. Sections of the media have already sought to use the salaries dispute to promote the introduction of performance pay into NSW public schools.

By linking a teacher’s salary to student test results, performance pay would be a step toward individual contracts. It would pit teachers against each other, inevitably penalise those who work with disadvantaged and less able students, and intensify competition between schools, exacerbating inequality. Students would also suffer through a heightened focus on constant testing, usually narrowly defined in terms of literacy and numeracy.

In recent months, the Sydney Morning Herald has produced several editorials advocating the introduction of performance pay. One in March, headed “Going for the best teachers,” claimed that compared to poor teaching, factors such as “poverty versus affluence, language difficulties, parents’ education, school facilities, gender” were “insignificant” in influencing a student’s results.

The following month, an editorial denounced the present method of paying teachers according to their qualifications and years of service as one of “stagnation”. It demanded greater “flexibility” to “allow the natural selection of the fittest teachers”. In July, the Herald called for “some form of performance measurement to reward and encourage good teaching practice and cull those who should not be in the classroom”.

Such measures would pave the way for the victimisation of teachers who in any way oppose or resist the erosion of conditions or the narrowing of school curricula.

Liberal Party opposition leader John Brogden championed performance pay in the lead up to the March state election, but disavowed it after receiving a hostile response from teachers. The Vinson report also moved toward performance pay by supporting moves to set up a teachers’ institute to enforce teaching standards and make teachers more accountable for their students’ test results.

Over recent years, the Teachers Federation has shown its fundamental agreement with the government’s “competitive” framework for public education. By mounting a campaign for a seemingly substantial pay rise, it is seeking to win back support among teachers and thus best position itself to implement the next round of government attacks.

On its website, the union’s own call for support for the salaries campaign emphasises the Australian Education Union’s readiness to work with state and federal governments to draw up a national plan to address the crisis in public education. Its only condition is that they increase their 3 percent limit on pay rises. “The AEU will constructively work with governments to implement such a plan but the first step must be to withdraw the nonsensical edict on salary increases,” the campaign message declares.

This is a warning that behind the salaries campaign, the union is preparing to deepen its collaboration with the federal Howard government and the state Labor administrations as they continue to shift funding to private schools and step up their offensive against public school teachers.

See Also:
Report highlights deterioration of Australian public schools
[11 November 2002]
Australian government strategy succeeds:
Private school enrolments rise at expense of public schools
[15 March 2001]
Lack of alternative leads New South Wales teachers to accept union deal
[19 June 2000]
Australia: Teachers’ union agrees to sellout deal with NSW Labor government
[30 May 2000]