Australia: New South Wales teachers union fails on sell-off deal on wages and working conditions

The three-year remuneration agreement between the NSW Teachers’ Federation (NSWTF) and Chris Minns’ state Labor government was reached on October 28 in a deeply anti-democratic process.

After lengthy, secret behind-the-scenes negotiations with the government, union bureaucrats organized a vote on the agreement just over two hours after any information was released about its implications for the pay and living conditions of 58,000 public school teachers in Australia’s most populous state. The full text of the agreement was kept secret, and only a page and a half, 19-point summary was released before the vote.

This illegitimate and anti-democratic process was organized to suppress any discussion and verification of the terms of the agreement between the union and the government. The deal would worsen the crisis plaguing the public education system and further reduce real wages for school workers.

The agreement calls for annual sub-inflationary wage increases of 3 percent over the next three years. This falls far short of rising food, fuel and rent prices.

NSWTF President Henry Rajendra (who earns more than a quarter of a million dollars a year) said the pay rise maintained the “historic reset in teacher salaries” achieved last year. Rajendra was referring to a deal struck in 2023 that provided a 12.15 percent pay increase for beginning teachers, 20.6 percent for second-year teachers, 4.3 percent for third-year teachers and 8.5 percent for fourth-year teachers. . These wage proposals may have been seen as a step forward, but when taken in the context of the previous 12 years of below-inflation wage freezes, they did not come close to restoring parity for the vast majority of educators.

Monday’s “proposal” included an annual increase in the retirement age of 0.5 percent. This was deliberately misleading as the super increase was a mandatory requirement for all Australian employers.

An annual taxable one-time cost-of-living adjustment payment of $1,000 was offered if “inflation exceeds 4.5 percent in the year ending the March quarter.” This nominal and meager amount of $19 a week is not enough to combat the ever-increasing cost of living. In Sydney, for example, households need to earn a staggering $290,000 a year to afford a mortgage on an average-priced home.

With teachers facing another three years of real pay cuts, virtually nothing has been addressed about teachers’ unsustainable workloads. It was previously expected that the additional two-hour exemption from face-to-face teaching (RFF) for embattled elementary school teachers would be eliminated entirely. Currently, even the existing two-hour planning and estimating costs are often not met due to severe staff shortages.

Teachers are pushed to their limits. Australian teachers work nearly 20 percent longer than the OECD average and their workload is increasing. Increasing administrative, technology and database demands, as well as cuts in support services, resulted in teachers working more than 50 hours per week. More than 70 percent of Australian teachers plan to leave the profession before retirement.

Enrollment into teaching programs in NSW is down 30 per cent and half of those who start teaching fail to complete it. Twenty percent leave the profession within three years, as well as a huge cohort of experienced teachers who retire early.

In August, the NSW government reported there were 1,698 teacher vacancies remaining in the state’s 2,200 schools. Schools in regional and remote centers were hit the hardest, leading to the cancellation of subjects and classes. Many teachers are forced to teach outside their area of expertise. There are still more than a thousand unfilled vacancies in regional centers, despite the government offering teachers a $20,000 bonus to move to regional areas.

Public school teachers now struggle to teach classes of more than 30 students. They are struggling to cope with a host of complex learning needs, rising violence, mental health and behavioral issues without much-needed support in overcrowded and decrepit classrooms.

These appalling conditions have led to mass teachers’ strikes in 2021 and 2022, the first called by a union in a decade. However, in November 2022, the NSWTF called for an end to the strike, asking teachers to vote for a state Labor government to push for better pay and working conditions.

Striking NSW teachers at a rally in Sydney in May 2022.

New Labor Prime Minister Chris Minns has made it clear that even nominal wage increases will be paid for in the form of “productivity gains”, i.e. increased exploitation and worsening working conditions.

In April, the NSW government announced it would cut the public schools budget by $1.4 billion over four years, insisting the funding cuts reflected declining public school enrollment. The decline in public school enrollment and the increase in private schools was deliberately engineered by successive Labor and Liberal federal and state governments working hand in hand with the teachers’ union bureaucracy. For decades, public schools have been underfunded while private schools have received billions of dollars in public money.

The state education department announced further cuts in September, eliminating hundreds of jobs in central education support services. Subsequently, their work focused on individual schools.

For its part, Albany’s federal Labor government has cut public school funding in real terms in its 2023 budget. Funding increased by only 5.7 percent, well below then-current inflation rates and 2 percent population growth.

The recommendations released Monday included a vague outline of what the union called “significant improvements to teachers’ working conditions.”

One was an additional three days of development per year. These student-free days are filled with ever-growing mandatory online vocational training programs, including first aid and statutory reporting, anaphylaxis training, asthma modules and health and safety courses. They, in between staff meetings where teachers are briefed on the new levels of compliance, paperwork and data they will be faced with, dominate much of the development day.

Other adjustments to the terms included “a new bonus clause recognizing the gendered nature of the profession”, “Improved data collection and assessment practices” and “Additional entitlements to family and domestic violence leave and special maternity leave”. Such “benefits” are largely symbolic and teachers should be under no illusion that any of them will actually lighten their workload and conditions.

Shutdown rallies organized throughout the state on the morning of October 28 were designed to ensure a yes vote. To prevent genuine discussion or debate, teachers were unable to access union recommendations until shortly before meetings began. Then, in hundreds of different places, teachers listened to a television broadcast of union leaders praising the deal.

At that time, completely insufficient time was allocated for questions and debates. Most questions focused on statements about workload improvement. Having received no clarification from union representatives, teachers were told to put questions in writing and send them to the head of the NSWTF. A vote was then taken on the agreement, and teachers were forced to urgently return to school.

Members of the Committee on Public Education (CFPE) attended events urging teachers to vote against the agreement. In one working-class western suburbs of Sydney, a CFPE member opposed the recommendation and cited the undemocratic process in which the vote was taken.

“No one here has seen the full agreement, let alone digested the union’s recommendations,” she explained. “Why weren’t the recommendations sent out a week ago? If the deal was good, they would do it. The secrecy surrounding the voting process reflects the fact that this is not the case. The Public Education Committee calls for an end to these anti-democratic deals that prevent informed teacher debate.”

In these highly restrictive and anti-democratic conditions, the fact that the union received a significant number of “yes” votes can hardly be interpreted as a decisive approval of the deal. Teachers were forced to vote on something they had not had the opportunity to scrutinize. And the deal was struck after two years during which the union bureaucracy systematically suppressed any struggle by teachers against the increasingly onerous conditions they face.

This is wider than just New South Wales. Over the past two years, teachers’ unions and Labour-led states in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia have struck sell-off agreements, leading to an ever-deepening crisis in the public school system. Across the NSW public service, tens of thousands of workers, including nurses and other health staff, are seeing trade unions hold fire sales.

This highlights the need for teachers and public sector workers to forge a new path and take matters into their own hands, independent of the union apparatus.

Educators must organize their own grassroots committees, democratically controlled by teachers themselves, to discuss and develop a program of action that meets the needs of teachers, rather than what governments and unions think is available.

This must include the fight to overcome the isolation imposed by the union bureaucracy and unite teachers at the national level. Above all, this fight must be directed against the political establishment, including Labor and the unions, which teachers face as the main obstacle in their fight for decent wages, working conditions and free, high-quality public education.

Contact CFPE:
Email: [email protected]
Facebook: facebook.com/commforpubliceducation
Twitter: CFPE_Australia
Facebook: facebook.com/groups/opposeaeusellout