Elevating teachers’ status

By Maree O’Halloran

The Government's unprecedented political and legal intervention in our salaries case reduced the outcome.

Public education teachers must now ask themselves what magnitude of political and industrial campaigning will significantly increase the salary levels of the profession and hence their consequential status. In this campaign Federation made every effort to avoid the government-driven disputation of previous campaigns. The planks of the campaign included:

• the Vinson Inquiry
• after-school and holiday rallies
• extensive paid advertising
• intensive lobbying of MPs and industrial bans
• historic industrial action across three states and industrial bans
• a case to the Industrial Relations Commission
• locally-initiated action
• 48-hours of action in response to the Government's intervention.

Community and media support remained strong even during the last month when action increased. For example, the Goulburn Post editorial of May 26 said: "Time to elevate teachers' status. Parents of school children should look harder at the issues causing teachers in the public education system to walk off the job tomorrow."

By awarding teachers a crude, political increase of 12 per cent, the Industrial Relations Commission has effectively vacated the field. The decision says to teachers if you want a significant breakthrough for the whole profession, then you have to do so in direct confrontation with the Government.

The 12 per cent decision was completely inadequate. The decision to award teachers in promotions positions in Catholic schools more than their counterparts in public schools was perverse. The Commission acted on a submission from the Catholic employers consented to by the Independent Education Union. Federal and State Government money funds at least 80 per cent of the wages bill in Catholic schools. Catholic schools are awash with government funds. On the other hand, the Government mounted a manufactured and offensive "incapacity to pay" argument in our case. This is not an issue of promotions teachers versus classroom teachers. This is an issue of whether our system will be institutionalised as a system of lesser value. Once this disparity is cemented in an award, it will inevitably spread to classroom teachers.

The Catholic employers argued, and the Commission accepted, that educational leaders in Catholic schools have a special responsibility to build the faith in their communities. Thus we now have government money clearly being spent on religion, not education. Federation is investigating the possibility of a constitutional challenge in the High Court about the use of federal and state government monies for such purposes.

The full funding commitment in the June 22 State Budget is a direct result of teachers' action. Treasurer Michael Egan said in Parliament: "This increase will fully fund the 12 per cent pay increase awarded to teachers. In other words the teachers' pay rise will be fully funded by additional budget funds and not from existing education resources."

The explicit commitment to full funding ensures that there will be no "trade offs" in this salaries round and no loss of teaching and learning conditions. It is the first time we have won explicit commitments and these commitments explode the farce of public sector "enterprise bargaining" and "productivity" bargaining.

The full funding commitment also exposes that the Government's incapacity to pay arguments were always false, manufactured to lower the outcome of the salaries case.

The Government can afford to offer and pay teachers a significant salary increase; it has made a political decision not to do so. Budgets are about political choices. We have made the Government change its political choice to 12 per cent fully-funded. We are halfway to our goal. Certainly the 12 per cent increase is more than the salaries outcome in other states and to previous outcomes in NSW over the last decade. It has been achieved from the date of the expiry of the current award and with no "trade offs" or change to award conditions. However, it is not the significant breakthrough that the profession requires. We must now explore any legal avenue of increasing the 12 per cent and prepare for the next campaign which will be initiated at Annual Conference next month.

Devolution and deregulation

The Government opportunistically brought forward their devolution and deregulation plan to exploit the problem for public education created by the Industrial Relations Commission's decisions. Federation had expected this plan to be promulgated in 2005 to coincide with the expiry of both the 2004 award and the staffing agreement. The early exposure of this agenda allows us to mobilise to defeat it.

The announcement by Federal Education Minister Dr Brendan Nelson on June 22 that Federal funding would be tied to greater principal autonomy is of grave concern. It has the potential to deny equitable staffing across NSW.

Federal election

However, in a repeat of 2001, Federal Labor announced the next day that they would allow the iniquitous States Grants Act to pass, arguing that in Government they would make changes. Labor's decision lacks courage and allows massive funding to private schools to continue unabated and devalues public education.

For further information

June 2004 contents