Under the agreement, teachers will be granted a 2 per cent pay rise per year – although, with 1 per cent being paid in January and the other 1 per cent paid in July, detractors of the deal argue it really only amounts to a 1.5 per cent raise.
With inflation at 5.1 per cent and predicted to rise to a peak of 7 per cent this year, the wage agreement amounts to a pay cut.
Further galling Victorian teachers, their counterparts in New South Wales have repeatedly gone on strike this year over a proposed 3 per cent pay rise, which the NSW Teachers Federation – the state’s branch of the AEU – labelled “insulting”.
Nearly 40 per cent of Victorian AEU members voted against the latest agreement and many have quit the union in response to it, including Melbourne teacher and teacher tutor Toni Frazer.
Frazer told EducationHQ she has become so disillusioned with teaching that she is considering leaving the profession entirely.
“Teachers are very disillusioned right now as to whether or not to remain in this job, myself included,” she said.
“It's at a point where we're in a crisis … People love teaching and they love the kids and they love so many elements of being a teacher, however, we're not being paid for the hours that we work and the [working] conditions were not considered enough in terms of creating an agreement.
“I think that where a lot of people are sitting at the moment is, do we remain in this job and accept the conditions that have been given to us? The people that should care about us don't, because they should have fought for more for us, rather than just one hour less face-to-face time.”
While the AEU is quick to highlight the workload concessions gained in the latest agreement, including a one-hour reduction in face-to-face teaching time per week, increasing to 1.5 hours from 2024, Frazer said it doesn’t go nearly far enough.
“We're at a point where, ultimately, the number of classes that you're teaching and the amount of admin and meetings, it's only gotten bigger and bigger, but the workload hasn't changed and the classes haven't changed, so when do we have time to do any of this stuff?
“I think that's where people are at the moment, our personal time has been encroached on to the point where it's not healthy.”
Frazer is particularly frustrated that AEU members voted to strike if necessary, but the union never exercised this option.
“We had voted for industrial action,” she said.
“We were ready to go the next level and people thought that's where we were heading, that they were gearing up for strikes.
“And then [the union] put it out there [that] ‘positive steps have been taken’, so everyone's like, ‘Okay, so we had voted to strike, now we're not needing to do that, this must mean good things’.
“But the day that the agreement was announced by [then-Education Minister] James Merlino, even my principals were shocked at just how underwhelming the agreement was.”
Frazer said that teachers’ morale is lower than she’s ever seen.
“It's only Term 2 and it feels like Term 4 and people are just counting down to the holidays,” she said.
“I've never seen it like this in over a decade, this feeling, it's just a dread that we're stuck on this wheel, and everything just keeps turning and nothing has changed and nothing will change.”
At Kew High School, where Victorian branch president Meredith Peace once taught, sixteen teachers signed a letter to the AEU expressing their anger at the agreement – first reported in The Age.
At least twelve of these teachers have since quit the union, including literacy specialist Dr Karen Lynch.
Lynch told EducationHQ she was also angered by the union’s decision to accept the Government’s pay offer without striking.
“The industrial campaign had no teeth whatsoever,” she said.
“We all knew that we were heading towards an election at the end of this year, and we all thought it will be the perfect time to strike. Dan and his government will not want to have a pay dispute on their hands when they're going to an election, they expect to have teachers in their back pocket, but we were denied that right. So I was furious with that.”
Lynch said that Victorian teachers have been left to champion their New South Wales counterparts from the sidelines.
“[Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary] Sally McManus is championing the rights of New South Wales teachers to gain a pay rise, and, by all accounts, parents in the community are behind New South Wales teachers, they believe they do deserve a pay rise.
“It's interesting that New South Wales teachers are capitalising on the uptick in public sentiment towards teachers, because during COVID teaching entered the home and parents could better see the work that teachers do … it was a perfect time to trade in on that public sentiment, but we were denied that right in Victoria.”
Lynch added that, if Victoria had a Liberal government, she has no doubt the AEU would have gone on strike.
“I do think that at the time, because of COVID and because Dan Andrews, Brett Sutton and the whole team did a really great job managing COVID, I think everyone was possibly a bit ‘Dan-struck’ and thought, ‘Let's not make their lives harder’.
“And I agree, I think they did a great job in terms of managing the pandemic, I'm fully behind that. So maybe there was a little element of that.
“A lot of people make note of the fact that they're striking under a Liberal government in New South Wales, and I would have no doubt that if we were dealing with a Liberal government, we would have gone on strike. I'm not going to say they're in bed together or anything like that, but I'm saying the conditions were such that people were feeling a great deal of admiration for the Government.”
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, pictured during a COVID-19 press conference.
Another Melbourne teacher told EducationHQ that she recently quit the AEU due to inadequate pay and the new time in lieu arrangements.
Under the new agreement, teachers must be provided with time in lieu for any structured school activities, such as camps, excursions and after-hours sports.
Many teachers have expressed concern that the new arrangement could see students at under-resourced schools miss out on extracurricular activities.
“I quit the AEU because, especially after lockdown, I just felt underappreciated when our pay didn't even go up with the rate of inflation. It was a bit of a kick in the guts to be honest,” Jane* said.
“But mostly it was because I felt like the kids are going to be the ones that are going to lose out the most. Camps and excursions, for example, that has to come out of the school's budget, and I could just see that at a lot of low socioeconomic status schools, it will be the kids that miss out, we just won't be running those excursions and those camps anymore.
“So once again, coming out of lockdown, the idea that we're going to have fewer of those things that kids missed out on for so long was pretty devastating to hear really.”
The agreement had significant benefits for Education Support (ES) staff, with many workers pocketing large pay increases.
Jane said that, because of this, it was difficult for teachers to speak out against it.
“I was pretty quiet about the fact that I voted no,” she said.
“It isn't something that I was really advertising because I did feel as though it might be a little bit taboo to vote no when ES staff benefited quite a lot with the new agreement. So it wasn't something that I wanted to shout from the rooftops…
“And then as people were kind of subtly asking, ‘How do you feel about the new agreement going through?’ If I knew them, I'd say, ‘Oh, actually, I left the union’. And it turns out that a lot of people did the same thing.
“I feel almost ashamed to have quit the union, but I just felt really defeated by it.”
"This was consciously planned"
Sue Phillips is a Victorian AEU member and national convenor of the Committee for Public Education (CFPE) – a rank-and-file group of teachers, university workers, parents and students, established by the far-left Socialist Equality Party.
The CFPE vocally opposed the Victorian workplace agreement, labelling it a “sell-out deal”.
“We described it as a monstrous betrayal,” she said.
“Even if you agree that it was a 2 per cent raise ... it was a wage cut...
“What the AEU argued on this issue 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.”
Phillips said the AEU has made a conscious decision to keep industrial campaigns in different states separate.
“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.
“They were prepared and have been for the last decade to impose the demands of the Labor Government and in particular, to block off any sort of industrial action or any unified campaign of teachers across borders.”
Phillips said the CFPE set up a Facebook group for teachers to voice their concerns about the agreement in response to censorship by the AEU.
“We established a separate page from our regular CFPE Facebook page, just for those who wanted to come and discuss, debate and share information about the agreement in a completely uncensored group.
“People can raise whatever they like, they aren't going to get shut down, shut up, whatever, which is what was happening not just on the AEU Facebook page, but even in meetings that were called online by the union.
“There was no chat, you couldn't put your messages in the chat. You were muted, you couldn't speak, couldn't even raise your hand. It was critical for teachers to discuss the agreement, what they thought about it, outside of this censorship and suppression of oppositional voices.”
Phillips said that teachers are being pushed over the edge by stress and burnout.
“We know that you can't pressure the union to change course here or democratise the union. The experiences of the last few months show that you can't...
“Anger and frustration is not going to resolve this problem. Teachers have got to develop new forms of organisation, and that's why we continually have stressed the fight for rank-and-file committees at the workplaces, independent of the unions. That's what we're really fighting for.”
In response to questions and criticisms raised by those interviewed for this article, AEU Victorian Branch deputy president Justin Mullaly provided the following statement:
"The AEU negotiated significant workload relief on behalf of members, including a reduction of face-to-face teaching hours of one and a half hours, the first reduction in more than 35 years.
“This workload relief formed the heart of our log of claims in direct response to members telling us that unsustainable workloads was the highest priority to address."
*Name changed to protect identity
