When CFPE members interviewed over Australian Education Union’s wage-cutting industrial agreement

Anger toward the Australian Education Union (AEU) among teachers and school workers in the state of Victoria continues to find expression following its imposition of a regressive, four-year industrial agreement.

The deal struck by the union and the state Labor government centrally involves a substantial real wage cut, with nominal salaries rising by less than 2 percent a year while official inflation skyrockets above 5 percent.

In addition, the deal did nothing to mitigate the untenable workloads and onerous working conditions within the schools, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The enormous crisis of the grossly underfunded public education system will be exacerbated.

Despite systematic union censorship and misinformation, record numbers of teachers, nearly 40 percent, voted against the agreement in delegates meetings held in March and in a general ballot conducted in May. Since then, significant numbers of teachers, likely thousands, have resigned from the AEU.

Many have turned toward the Committee for Public Education (CFPE), which spearheaded the fight against the AEU-Labor government deal. The committee’s Facebook group, which was established to coordinate opposition to the agreement, continues to grow and now has more than 800 teachers and school workers following it.

Two media outlets, EducationHQ and 3CR Radio, recently interviewed members of the CFPE.

 

EducationHQ is an online publisher that also prints several magazines, including Australian Teacher, which is widely distributed in school staff rooms. Its July 13 article (paywalled but available here), “‘Monstrous betrayal’: Furious Vic teachers abandon AEU over wage agreement,” interviewed several teachers who had quit the union over the sell-out deal.

The article also featured comments from CFPE national convenor Sue Phillips. “We described [the agreement] as a monstrous betrayal,” she told the publication. “What the AEU argued on this issue [of wages] was that inflation in Victoria was somehow different to what it was nationally. I mean, it was a complete joke. It’s a massive wage cut, and that’s for four years.”

EducationHQ noted that the CFPE had stated that the teacher unions had separated and isolated industrial campaigns of teachers in Victoria and New South Wales. Phillips was again quoted: “One of the things that we’ve continually stressed throughout the campaign is that this agreement that the AEU signed off on was not a mistake, or some sort of weakly-devised campaign, or the result of poor negotiating skills—it was consciously planned by the AEU bureaucrats.“Now the pressure is on from the financial markets and the credit rating agencies for austerity measures, for the debt and deficit to be reduced on the back of the working class. That’s where this agreement ultimately comes from—one very direct way you can reduce debt and deficits, as far as the ruling class is concerned, is to undermine the wages and conditions of public sector workers. And so what the AEU has done is to create a really dangerous precedent that’s not just going to affect teachers in Victoria but public sector workers across the country.”The CFPE member spoke on the role of the AEU, and responded to the host’s remarks that she and the program were very “pro-union.” He said: “It’s important to understand what the Australian Education Union bureaucracy is. Its senior officials earn a quarter of a million dollars annually, which places them within the top 1 percent of all income earners. Now this creates a situation in which the union bureaucracy comprises a distinct social stratum, whose interests are very different to the interests of ordinary teachers and school workers.”

Borrell responded: “I wonder how they can justify that … brokering a deal that has a substantial wage cut for teachers, while earning a quarter of a million dollars as a representative of teachers’ interests?”