Updated ,first published
Victorian teachers, principals and education support staff will be offered a “watershed” pay rise of 28.3 per cent over the next four years by the state government, as Labor tries to avoid school strikes planned for next week.
The offer would bring support-staff pay increases into lockstep with teachers and includes an increase of 12.75 per cent for all by October 2026.
The revised offer to teachers is a slight advance on the government’s previous position of a 28 per cent increase over four years, but less than the 35 per cent over three years sought by union members.
The union will hold a meeting late on Friday to consider the offer and its next steps.
The Australian Education Union has accused Labor of making “an anti-union move” by indicating it will seek to bypass them and go straight to employees, and directly emailed public teachers across the state with the offer.
Education Minister Ben Carroll, who is also deputy premier, said going straight to the workforce was key after a previous union-endorsed offer was rejected in a vote of rank and file teachers.
“I signed an agreement with the Australian Education Union last time, an agreement that they themselves described as being really good,” Carroll said on Friday.
“What I’ve decided this time is, having met with the union and having put the offer to them, that I directed the secretary to also email the offer to every single government teacher that’s out there.
“This is a watershed agreement … when I talk to teachers, they told me. They don’t want to go on strike. They want another offer, and this is what I’m doing.”
AEU Victorian president Justin Mullaly said the government should never have gone directly to members, and that if the government was “dead-set serious” about supporting teachers, it wouldn’t have ignored school funding concerns for so long.
The revised pay deal would also mean teachers would have required meeting hours halved from 80 to 40 hours a year, and teachers at the top of the pay scale would be given an annual lump-sum payment.
The Allan government will hope the revised offer can stave off a mass walk-off that would disrupt learning at hundreds of government schools on July 23.
School staff voted for the 24-hour statewide strike and a ban on working unpaid overtime during a meeting of more than 100 union representatives this week.
The AEU will face significant pressure from within its ranks to return to the negotiating table, as members of its left faction push against compromising on key issues.
However, one vocal group signalled its intention to organise its own strikes if the AEU accepted anything less than what it called “our red lines”, before the revised offer was made.
They included a 35 per cent pay increase over three years for teachers, reduced class sizes and face-to-face teaching time, and a maximum of one hour of meetings per week.
The vocal Victorian union members planned to push for better conditions for education support staff, including a pay deal in step with teachers as well as paid lunch breaks.
A separate union group, the Keilor Downs College sub-branch, organised a rally outside Carroll’s office in Niddrie on Thursday.
George Pattichis, the president of the AEU sub-branch at Keilor Downs College, said the rally was called because members “were tired of waiting for our union leaders to act”.
“Our leaders called off strike action in term 2 to come up with a completely inadequate agreement. We rejected that deal because it did nothing to address our unbearable workloads and left education support staff further behind,” Pattichis said.
Mullaly refused to be drawn on whether the group was undermining his work on getting a pay deal through for members.
Up to 35,000 teachers, principals and education support workers walked off the job for a day in March in pursuit of a better deal on pay and conditions, taking to the streets of Melbourne’s CBD in the state’s first mass teachers’ strike in 13 years.
Teachers had been planning to stop work again in May, but the rolling strikes were called off after the union reached an in-principle agreement with the government.
Keilor Downs College humanities teacher Liz Walsh said Thursday’s rally should send a message to the government.
“They are not only negotiating with the union leadership, they are negotiating with rank-and-file unionists, and we are in no mood to settle for a marginally better deal that fails to meet the needs of all school staff: teachers and education support workers alike,” Walsh said.
Carroll said the government was urging union leadership to put the revised offer to members and call off the strike.
“Students should be in classrooms and parents shouldn’t be left scrambling for childcare or losing a day’s pay,” he said. “Let’s keep kids in school next Thursday.”
Get alerts on breaking news as it happens. Sign up for our Breaking News Alert.
Caroline Schelle is an education reporter, and joined The Age in 2022. She previously covered courts at AAP.Connect via X or email.From our partners
Read the full article here
