Salaries: Federation defers industrial action scheduled for 29 November

NSW Teachers Federation President, Bob Lipscombe said yesterday, after the statewide Council meeting of the Federation:

"Professional and attractive salaries must be maintained if the O'Farrell government is to properly staff NSW public schools and TAFE colleges with appropriately qualified and experienced teaching staff.

"At stopwork meetings on 2 November, 2011 99.67% of teachers voted to reject the salaries offers made by the NSW government, which would see the real income of teachers cut. Those meetings called on the Federation to call a 24 hour stopwork meeting on 29 November if the government failed to make a fair and reasonable salaries offer and failed to make satisfactory progress in negotiations.

"Since that decision, salaries negotiations have commenced and although the government is yet to provide a fair and reasonable salaries offers, developments indicate that progress towards this may be possible.

"As a consequence of this, and to allow for the negotiation of fair and reasonable salaries outcomes for public education teachers in NSW if possible, Federation Council  today determined to defer consideration of further industrial action.

"To facilitate these negotiations, Council also called upon the Minister for Education to honour the undertaking provided in writing to the Federation on 21 March, 2011 that 'Under a Liberals and Nationals government the Minister for Education will be personally involved in the salaries award negotiations which will occur this year.'

"The Executive and Senior Officers will closely monitor developments in the coming days, and if these prove to be unsatisfactory, Council has authorised Executive to call further statewide action, including industrial action at the commencement of the 2012 school and college year. "