The Australian Education Union From Federal Registration To National Reconciliation
The Australian Education Review is a series of books on subjects of current significance and emerging importance to Australian education. Up to three titles are produced each year. The books are written for a general audience and attempt to present a broad discussion of issues. As the series title suggests, the books describe and discuss current educational strategies or issues rather than undertake major research projects per se. They have a national focus, although case studies and research materials from individual states and regions, as well as from overseas, may well be included. As an additional resource for readers, each book includes a substantial bibliography. Further information is available from Dr Laurance Splitter, Editor, The Australian Education Review, Australian Council for Educational Research, Private Bag 55 CAMBERWELL, VIC 3124. Tel: +61 3 9277 5594, Fax: +61 3 9277 5500, email:
[email protected] Editorial Board Geoff Masters (Chair), Executive Director of ACER Professor Sid Bourke, Department of Education, University of Newcastle Ms Deirdre Morris, Publishing Manager, ACER Professor Jane Kenway, Language and Literacy Research Centre, School of Education, Underdale Campus, University of SA Professor Helen Praetz, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning) RMIT City Campus, Melbourne Dr Laurance Splitter (Editor), Principal Research Fellow, ACER
Australian Education Review No. 45
The Australian Education Union from Federal Registration to National Reconciliation Andrew Spaull
First published 2000 by The Australian Council for Educational Research Ltd 19 Prospect Hill Road, Camberwell, Melbourne, Victoria, 3124 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright © 2000 Australian Council for Educational Research All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Copyright Act 1968 of Australia and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers. Text typeset by Tom Kurema Printed by Ligare Pty Ltd National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Spaull, A.D. (Andrew David), 1943–. Australian Education Union: from federal registration to national reconciliation. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 86431 362 4 1. Australian Education Union – History. 2. Teachers’ Unions – Australia – History. I. Title. (Series: Australian education review. No. 45).
331.881137110994
Contents
Preface Abbreviations Introduction
vii ix xi
1 The Making of the Australian Teachers Union
1
2 Whither the Federation? (1984–92)
16
3 The Challenges of Modernisation
39
4 Modernisation: Women and Indigenous Members
69
5 Part of an Industrial Relations Revolution
87
6 The Union and the National Politics of Education
119
7 The Howard Government and the Union
148
8 The Union Abroad
169
9 Reflections
193
References
202
Index
209
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Preface
This study of the Australian Education Union (AEU), funded by an Australian Research Council small grant, examines the internal and external behaviour of a new federal trade union over the last 15 years. It is not an exhaustive study of the AEU and its predecessors. Those interested in its antecedents or its TAFE division or its particular branches will be disappointed, but limitations of time and space meant that these special interests are not covered in depth. Those interested in ‘organisational biographies’ that focus on personalities, factions and ideologies also will be disappointed, but this approach is better left to labour historians of the future. Finally, this is not an official study of the AEU, however it could not have been undertaken as an independent research topic without the cooperation of the Union. I was given complete access to the Union’s conferences, seminars, records and current files. There are two basic collections that I have consulted. The first are the collected papers held by the Noel Butlin, Archives Centre at the Australian National University, and as usual I am grateful for the assistance provided by the Centre’s staff at Canberra. The larger set of Union records, including working files, are held at the Union’s national office in South Melbourne. For these resources, I am grateful to the librarians, Joanne Clarke and Kati Sunner, and to the Union’s administrative staff, Tom Freeman, Sharon Goulding and Gavin Attard who helped me trawl through publications, reports, files and industrial cases. At another level, numerous AEU officials assisted me answering queries, providing additional materials and engaging in productive discussion on a wide range of issues and topics. I am therefore indebted to Robert Bluer, Sharan Burrow, Rob Durbridge, Don Calliope, Rex Hewitt, Linda Gale, Lisa Heap, Brian Henderson, Susan Hopgood, Rosalie Kinson, Matt O’Connor, Roy Martin and Richard Walsham for their patience, enthusiasm and advice throughout the research. Sharan, Rob, Richard (now returned to the NSW Teachers Federation) and Matt, especially, also vii
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commented critically on specific sections of the study. Fred Van Leeuwen and George Kux provided interviews, materials and European hospitality when I visited Education International’s headquarters, Brussels, in 1997. I am extremely grateful to two former Union presidents, Gerry Tickell and Di Foggo, for reading my manuscript, as I am to Martin Sullivan for his usual helpful suggestions on earlier drafts. My account and interpretations, as well as any errors, are mine alone. The study could not have been completed without the friendly professional assistance of my Faculty of Education colleagues, Bev Schneider, Heather Phillips, Jan Hanson, Lesley Farrell and Margaret Robinson. Brian Costar of the Arts Faculty, Monash University provided me with an office retreat when I took study leave to complete the book. Finally, I wish to thank Deirdre Morris at ACER and Mignon Turpin for their assistance in preparing this manuscript for publication. I wish to dedicate this book to a member of the AEU’s Victorian branch, Roger Spaull. For 35 years my brother has been a committed classroom teacher, grassroots union activist, supporter and critic. Nothing else needs to be said. A. D. S.
Abbreviations
ACSPA ACTTF ACTU ADAB AE AEC AEU AIEWs AIRC ALHMWU ANTA APHEDA AST ATC ATF ATSI ATU CLR CPSU DEET DOE EI FAUSA FEU FEUIC FSSTAA FTUV ICFTU IEU IFFTU
Australian Council of Salaried and Professional Officers Association Australian Capital Territory Teachers Federation Australian Council of Trade Unions Australian Development Assistance Board Aboriginal Education Australian Education Council Australian Education Union Aboriginal and Islander Education Workers Australian Industrial Relations Commission Australian Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union Australian National Training Authority Australian People for Health, Education and Development Abroad (Inc.) Advanced Skills Teacher Australian Teaching Council Australian Teachers Federation Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Australian Teachers Union Commonwealth Law Reports Community and Public Sector Union Department of Employment, Education and Training (Commonwealth) Department of Education – Victoria Education International Federation of Australian Universities Staff Associations Federation of Education Unions Federation of Education Unions Information Centre Federated State School Teachers Association of Australia Federated Teachers Union of Victoria International Confederation of Free Trade Unions Independent Education Union International Federation of Free Trade Unions ix
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ILO IR ITF ITF KTAV NBEET NEA NETUV NNTA NPQTL NSN NSP NSWTF NTEU NTTF PRP QPOA QTU SADTU SAIT SPSF SSTUWA TAA TAFE TAFETA TTF TTUV TUTA UNESCO VAT VATF VPF VSTA VTU WCOTP WFEA WOTP WRA
International Labour Organisation Industrial Reports Independent Teachers Federation International Trust Fund of ATF/AEU Kindergarten Teachers Association of Victoria National Board of Employment, Education, and Training National Education Association (USA) National Educational Trade Union of Vietnam Nepal National Teachers Association National Project on the Quality of Teaching and Learning National Schools Network National Schools Project New South Wales Teachers Federation National Tertiary Education Union Northern Territory Teachers Federation Professional Recognition Program Queensland Professional Officers Association Queensland Teachers Union South African Democratic Teachers Union South Australian Institute of Teachers State Public Services Federation State School Teachers Union of Western Australia Teachers Association of Australia Technical and Further Education Technical and Further Education Teachers Association Tasmanian Teachers Federation Technical Teachers Union of Australia Trade Union Training Authority United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Victorian Association of Teachers Victorian Affiliated Teachers Federations Victorian Principals Federation Victorian Secondary Teachers Association Victorian Teachers Union World Confederation of Organisations of the Teaching Profession World Federation of Education Associations World Organisation of the Teaching Profession Workplace Relations Act (1996)
Introduction This is a study of the Australian Education Union (AEU) which has a membership of 157 000 and is the third largest trade union in Australia. It is also one of Australia’s newest unions. Established in 1984 as the Australian Teachers Union, and becoming the Australian Education Union in 1993, it is a federal organisation of government school teachers employed in the states and territories. The study was undertaken to meet my own challenge posed in 1986, which was: if ‘the slumbering giant of teachers unions, the Australian Teachers Federation’, succeeded in changing to a federal union and obtained federal industrial awards and agreements, ‘then the late 1980s [and beyond] will belong’ to the Union (Spaull, 1986, pp. i, ii). The book examines the internal and external behaviour of the Union during its first 15 years (1984–98). In particular, it examines how effectively it has positioned itself in the changing federal industrial relations system and in the emergent national education system, as well as the manner in which it has responded to the numerous and increasingly varied problems experienced by its members as both workers in public education institutions and as union members. The rise of the Union has occurred in the worst of times, ‘New Times’; a period of unprecedented uncertainty in Australia. No one has been spared the restructuring of Australian institutions. The Union has had to confront the twin demons of ‘crisis in trade unionism’, and ‘crisis in public education’. Of the first, Peetz in his aptly titled book Unions in a Contrary World (1998) has opened his discussion of collapse in union membership, with the following observation: In the space of two decades from 1976 to 1996, union density (the proportion of employees belonging to a union) dropped by two-fifths. The union movement in a country which had once employed the highest density in the world is facing a crisis in membership. (p. 1)
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The union movement’s response to this crisis and how the Australian Education Union offered its own forms of ‘strategic unionism’ to meet the challenges of the 1990s becomes the focus of Chapters 3 and 4 of this book. I must forewarn here that the study of the Union’s ‘strategic unionism’ does not incorporate the academic debate in the USA and England by Kerchner and Mitchell (1988), Barber (1992), Lawn (1996), Lieberman (1997) and Bascia (1998) on the need for new models of union behaviour, such as ‘the professional teachers union’. Their arguments run that teacher unions, to be ‘relevant’ in the post-industrial society, must include concerns about improving educational standards and increasing outcomes in their negotiating claims with school authorities. My position is that these issues have not yet reached Australian teacher unions, which are still in the industrial conflict stage of ‘good faith bargaining’ (Spaull, 1990, 1998). The ‘crisis in public education’, which is not of the unions’ making in Australia, has many dimensions. It is driven by the pervasive climate of ‘economic rationalism’ and ‘new institutionalism’ or ‘institutional redesign’ (Seddon, Angus & Brown, 1998, p. 78). The AEU’s leadership documents its perception of the crisis in the following way: Public education is operating increasingly within a context of government hostility and opposition. Governments at both state/territory and federal levels appear to have little or no commitment to free universal public schooling, except as a social safety net for the children of the ‘disadvantaged’. Under the rubric of ‘choice’, these governments, wedded as they are to the tenets of deregulation and privatisation, are seeking to create a market in schooling. A necessary component of forcing the development of this market is to ensure that public schools are permanently underfunded so that quality is threatened and students are driven to seek private schooling. (Burrow & Martin, 1998, p. 97)
An additional element to these problems is the marked transformation in the labour process of teaching or ‘teachers’ work’. This has resulted from the increase of managerial control over teachers and a resultant loss of the professional autonomy enjoyed by teachers during the 1970s and early 1980s. It has occurred as employers have engineered, through compliance and consent, increased supervisory functions over teachers, controlling more rigidly a centrally determined curriculum and expecting teachers to participate more in non-classroom duties. Teachers have suffered not only from a loss of work privileges, but from an intensification of their work, not just teaching loads, to
INTRODUCTION
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meet the increasing social demands on education workplaces (Reid, 1997, pp. 515–21; Connell, 1995). The restructuring of public education and the transformation of teachers’ work act as environmental influences on the study of the Union throughout the book. This approach is consistent with my writing on other teacher unions where I adopt an industrial relations framework to help organise the materials and discussions on a union’s behaviour: Industrial relations is about conflict and accommodation between individuals and groups. This conflict and accommodation takes place with defined parameters, utilising identifiable processes and developing a framework of rules which both temporarily accommodates conflict and establishes working relationships between the individuals and the group. The conceptual notion of an industrial relations system is one basic way of organising the necessary information. (Spaull & Hince, 1986, p. 5)
In such a framework teacher union behaviour can be explained by focusing on a union’s internal relationships with its membership both individually and within its structures of branches and sub-branches, its external relationships with governments as policy-makers and, in the case of government schools, as employers and ‘public sector managers’. Any industrial conflict that occurs in this external situation is mediated through the regulatory processes offered by industrial tribunals (Spaull & Hince 1986, pp. 5–15, 60–77). Obviously, special emphasis is placed on the organisational characteristics of the Union, its goals and structure and on its generation of policy and strategy in the industrial, political and education systems. Recent useful approaches which view trade unions in a new organisational light, such as Provis’ (1996), insist that ‘organisational culture’ helps convey a sense of identity about a union. Also helpful are her views on the distribution of power within a union, though her application of the notion of ‘micropolitics’ to better understand ‘workplace or ‘enterprise’ unionism’ is not appropriate to this study which concentrates on the national behaviour of a federal union. It is important, however, to view the Union in terms of ‘what the Union is’ (its purposes and structures) and ‘what the Union does’ (its methods of action) (Martin, 1989). To understand ‘what the Union is’ requires an explanation of the growth of a federal trade union in education. This process entailed a shift away from the ‘consultative arrangements’ between the state teacher unions, formalised as the Australian Teachers Federation
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(ATF), to a federal structure where certain powers and responsibilities were ceded by the unions to the new Union. The new organisation was a ‘paper’ union that obtained registration as an employee organisation from the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC). Ultimately it took over all the functions of the ATF. This means the Union, adhering to a type of coordinative federalism, acts on behalf of state-employed teachers and other education workers in matters related to federal industrial relations, national education policy making, peak trade unionism at the national level and international education. The Union’s branches, and associated bodies of state unions in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia, retain considerable autonomy to pursue their strategies in the industrial and political arenas of the states’ and territories’ public education systems. The Union’s governing bodies at the national level are: the Federal Conference held annually; the Federal Executive held about five times a year (where in both cases elected delegates are represented proportionally to the size of the branches and associated bodies); and the elected officials, president and vice-president, and three elected federal officers, federal secretary, federal deputy secretary and federal Technical and Further Education (TAFE) secretary. The Union also appoints six professional officers to provide the various specialist operations of the Union. These officials and officers are referred to in this book as ‘the federal office’ and it is their work, along with the governing bodies and special caucuses of the Union, such as the Federal Women’s Conference, which form the basis of this study. There are few studies on the process of federalisation of Australian trade unionism to inform this study. Diversity and heterogeneity, which characterise modern Australian unions, also dominate their past (Rawson, 1986, p. 35). A reading of the many histories of individual unions reveals no distinct patterns of change in the making of federal structures or in the distribution of power between the centre and the existing state or district branches. Apart from unions of shearers, seamen and waterside workers (who belonged to genuine national industries), most unions moved to federal structures slowly and tentatively, and relied on the leadership of a few individuals to overcome the fears or suspicions of the many. Certainly, the protective mantle of federal compulsory arbitration was appealing, though not compelling, in the 1900s and the 1920s. But as Gahan (1996) argues in terms of ‘union dependency theory’ (on arbitration), and most union histories demonstrate, access to the federal system did not lead to an overwhelming, immediate demand either for federal regulation of employ-
INTRODUCTION
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ment conditions or for a highly centralised federal union structure. Taken together, the histories of federal unions defy the construction of a labour theory that will give a better understanding of the federalisation of teacher unionism in Australia. On another tack, my own attempts to theorise the emergence of teacher unions in Australasia and overseas, drawn from the mainstream of labour development theory, are difficult to apply to the Union’s emergence (Spaull, 1984). While it is obvious that the strategic variable of growth, a favourable socio-legal climate, is important in the teacher unions’ response to the opening up of the federal system to white-collar public employees in the states, the other two strategic variables – a united push for federal awards and resistance to adverse labour processes – are not as dominant in the Union’s formation. Teacher ‘union leadership’ was not united in its desire to create a federal union that would seek federal awards for teachers, nor was the Union formed primarily as a means of resisting the pernicious transformation of ‘teachers’ labour processes’. In essence, the creation of the Union is a classical example of a ‘paper union’ measure in Australia, which used the registration process to prevent other trade unions, or rival sections within teacher unions in the states, from obtaining first use and perhaps exclusive use of the federal arbitration system. As to ‘what the Union does’, an industrial relations framework which emphasises the internal structure responding to external influences to produce activity is a static, deterministic view of union behaviour. Gardner (1989) has studied nursing and teacher unionism in New South Wales and notes that industrial relations theory ‘explores what unions are for and what impact they have, but not how they implement policies and programmes’ (1989, p. 49). Gardner proposes that studies should concentrate on choices available to unions which can be assembled around the notion of ‘union strategy’ to explain a union’s internal/external behavioural relationships. Union strategy, in Gardner’s model, ‘the collected and collective judgements made within a union about means and ends’ (p. 50), is seen as the total of a number of discrete choices containing a range of options in each choice. Thus in the ‘policy arena’ both industrial (bargaining) and political (legislation and administration) options are available to a union in pursuit of its objectives. Similarly, in the choices available under ‘union method’ are unilateral control of the workplace, direct negotiations (collective bargaining), third party regulation (conciliation and arbitration) and political action, and so on. Although this study of the Union is a general one, and not one to advance industrial relations
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theory or labour development theory, the notion of union strategy as ‘collected and collective judgements’ is used ‘behind the scenes’ to inform the discussion in Chapters 3–8. This study does not engage with the sociological discussions on the class location of ‘school teachers’. Although I use the term ‘education workers’ and view these workers as belonging to a ‘national education industry’ as the Union argues before the federal commission, I have not entered the theoretical debate as to whether school teachers or education workers are part of the modern ‘proletarianisation’of whitecollar work. As much as the Australian work of White (1984), McCollow (1996) and Reid (1997) is persuasively argued it serves no purpose in a study like this to explore these questions. Rather, for the purposes of this book I see the Union’s members as being part of ‘a service salariat’ who in carrying out their tasks are ‘deeply committed, well qualified, and dedicated to the educational and personal wellbeing of their students’ (Australia, Senate Committee, A Class Act, 1998, p. 6). As Connell (1985, p. 69) put it so simply, ‘teachers are workers, teaching is work and the school is a workplace’.
1 The Making of the Australian Teachers Union ... this is a unique case; it is unprecedented. There never has been, ever, in the history of this commission the sudden creation of industry where previously there was a constitutional prohibition against its existence in the way in which the history that has been presented to the Registrar shows. Robert Hinkley, Teachers’ Registration Hearing, AIRC, 26 September 1986
Background Trade unions do not just come into being. There is no ‘big bang’ formation, nor even an orderly evolution towards emergence. Rather, unions are formed when a number of critical circumstances converge and workers sense or realise that it is time to unite collectively into a union which will defend and advance their economic interests and working conditions, whether they be coalminers, bank clerks or school teachers. Earlier studies of teacher union development in Australia (Spaull, 1984, 1989) have argued that the formation of teacher unions, like other trade unions, can be better understood if a theoretical framework is employed to identify the leading factors which contribute to the union formation. These factors are: a deterioration in teachers’ conditions of employment, as well as changes in their work process which challenge their professional autonomy; the existence of a union leadership that can clearly articulate the need for teachers to act through
1
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collective organisation; and a favourable socio-political and legal framework which will encourage, perhaps even promote, the formation and growth of a new union (Spaull, 1984). In January 1921 a meeting of several state-based unions decided to establish a national teachers’ federation which became the Australian [School] Teachers Federation in 1922. And so began the union’s long quest for ‘a place in the sun’ of national education politics and policy in Australia. It was to become a quest remarkable for the Federation’s hollow victories or outright failures as the ATF was largely ignored by state and federal governments and their bureaucracies from 1922–1982. Its one shining moment came after it encouraged the formation of the Federated State School Teachers Association of Australia (FSSTAA), a federal union of teachers with branches in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. (Spaull, 1987) This body ultimately became the unsuccessful plaintiff in the High Court’s State School Teachers decision (1929) which ruled that teachers could not obtain access to the federal industrial commission (further discussion later in this chapter). After the near collapse of both bodies during the Depression, the ATF reconstituted itself as a national federation in 1937 (Spaull, 1989), and for the next 45 years most state unions participated in what was widely seen as an annual national forum of teacher unions. Denied access to federal arbitration, the Federation concentrated on becoming the major pressure group in the emerging national polity, particularly on the issue of Commonwealth financial aid to state education systems. Again the Federation’s efforts were largely dismissed, apart from the Whitlam Governments’ support for the Federation’s direct involvement in the Schools Commission. By the early 1980s the Federation had returned to the political wilderness and worse – several of its affiliates and a vast majority of teacher rank and file refused to identify with the ATF, finding it irrelevant to their political and industrial activism. Only on two fronts, international education and affiliation with the trade union movement, did the ATF make any real headway, and then only late in the period. The ATF became a foundation member of one of three international teacher unions, the World Confederation of Organisations of the Teaching Profession (WCOTP) established in 1952 (see Chapter 8). Within the Federation leadership there was always keen competition to be nominated for overseas conferences, but there was little return for the early years of ATF involvement with these international bodies. A more practical approach was found in a pro-
THE MAKING OF THE AUSTRALIAN TEACHERS UNION
3
posal from Western Australia for ATF to sponsor the formation of an Australia/Asian Conference of Teachers’ Associations, but the 1956 annual conference preferred to wait for the development of WCOTP regional assemblies. Faster air travel and the holding of international conferences of the various unions in the same venue allowed greater ATF representation at these assemblies. The visit of a Canadian Teachers’ Federation representative in the late 1960s and the holding of a WCOTP Assembly in Sydney in 1970 encouraged the ATF to establish teacher development/union development programs in the region. The first ATF aid program was directed towards the Papua New Guinea Teachers’ Association. In 1974 the Federation adopted in principle the Canadian project program and introduced a union leadership program in Adelaide for officials from the Asian region, which was soon extended to the South Pacific. In 1978 the Federation boycotted a WCOTP Conference in Indonesia because it opposed the Indonesian invasion of East Timor and the gaoling of political activists, including teachers, since 1965. From the debate over this boycott emerged a more elaborate ‘ATF International policy’. It emphasised a strong commitment to human rights, mutual assistance financial schemes to emerging overseas unions, which became the basis of its International Trust Fund (ITF) (established 1982), and a long-term commitment to the unification of the various international associations of teacher unions into one international body (Annual Conference Report 1978, pp. 33–4). The ATF moved to embrace the Australian union movement because of its frustration in dealing with the Fraser Government. Affiliation with state labour councils and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) had always been a contentious issue for teacher unions. Only the New South Wales Teachers Federation (NSWTF) (1941), the Technical Teachers Union of Victoria (TTUV) (1975) and the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association (VSTA) (1976) had formed such affiliations. The Federation itself had rejected an ACTU affiliation resolution at its annual conference in 1944. In 1960, however, the Federation affiliated with the Australian Council of Salaried Professional Associations (ACSPA) which had been formed in 1957 as one of three peak organisations of white-collar unions. When R. J. Hawke was elected ACTU president in 1979 he mapped out a grand design for the modernisation of Australian trade unionism which included the merging of the two peak councils (Griffin & Guici, 1986). This strategy was slowly put into place, largely by the ACSPA’s
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leadership negotiating with its affiliates – including the teacher unions – the practical benefits of a merger with the ACTU. In 1977–78 the Federation was active in a public sector unions’ campaign against the Fraser Government’s funding cutbacks to public services. The alliance and campaign proved an unhappy experience for the Federation, but it strengthened its interest in ACSPA’s decision to merge its affiliates into the ACTU. ACSPA arranged for the ATF to participate in the ACTU education committee’s meetings and the unions’ pre-Budget submission to the government in 1978. As a result, the Federation’s 1979 annual conference endorsed the ACSPA/ACTU merger proposal and resolved to apply for affiliation with the ACTU. This was not a unanimous decision and the dissenters, the Tasmanian Teachers Federation (TTF) and the South Australian Institute of Teachers (SAIT), disaffiliated from the Federation. They returned with observer status at subsequent conferences and both rejoined the Federation, SAIT in 1983 and the TTF in 1984. The Federation’s application to the ACTU was accepted in time for the Federation to attend the ACTU congress in September 1980. Known as the ‘White Collars Move In’ Congress, the Federation’s large delegation of 51 helped strengthen the Left’s re-emergence in the conference and helped defeat the ACTU Executive’s expansionary uranium mining policy. The Federation, however, waited in vain for the debate on education policy, but this was deferred to the 1981 Congress. In the interim, the Federation was the leading participant in the first ‘education conference’, conducted by the ACTU, which was attended by 37 unions. The Federation’s leaders were satisfied with its initial entry into ACTU affairs. As general secretary Costello observed: I am pleased to report that having been affiliated to the ACTU for two years, a sufficient period for sinister tendencies to show up if they are going to, none of the dire predictions for its ill effects on our autonomy, finances, political purity or whatever have come to pass. (ATF Annual Report, 1981, p. 13)
The Federation was similarly pleased with the 1981 Congress’s discussion of the education report, and the fact that Keith Lawler from the Australian Capital Territory Teachers Federation (ACTTF) was elected to represent the ‘ACSPA group’ on the ACTU Executive. Jennie George, the NSWTF’s general secretary, stood for the vice-president’s office without the support of the ATF delegation and failed to gain a vote. Two years later the Congress voted George to the executive on the ‘ACSPA group’ seat; she became the first woman to serve on the
THE MAKING OF THE AUSTRALIAN TEACHERS UNION
5
ACTU Executive. The 1983 Congress, noted for its ‘dullness and consensus’ in accepting the Labor government–ACTU accord on Prices and Income, was significant for the role of the emergent women’s caucus in Congress debates. The ATF delegation, comprising 29 women in a delegation of 63, contributed to this new force in ACTU politics. The return of SAIT and the TTF to the Federation ensured even larger delegations at the next Congress and the Federation became the second largest constituent member of the ACTU. By early 1983 the Federation had ‘come of age’. It was a large organisation (representing all of Australia’s state teacher unions) embedded within the political aura of the Hawke Labor Government’s new consensus, and a vital, but still learning, constituent in the national trade union movement. Its one basic weakness, inherited 50 years earlier, was its lack of genuine industrial strategies. True, the Federation had never forgotten it aimed to represent the economic interests of teachers. Thus as early as 1938, moral and physical support had been lent to the equal-pay-for-women campaigns, waged nationally and by the affiliates in the states. Similarly, in 1972 the Federation developed a ‘Teachers Charter’ for working conditions. Its only practical involvement in industrial negotiations was when it joined the Territory affiliates in their discussions with the Commonwealth on regulating teachers’ conditions in the new Commonwealth Teaching Service (established 1971). But on basic industrial issues it remained sidelined, waving the ‘Teachers Charter’ and watching the state unions do battle with employers. And when it explored issues like a national registration scheme for teachers, or federal registration of the ATF, or a national log of industrial conditions, it quickly consigned its working parties’ reports to the ‘too hard file’. In doing so it was behaving in much the same way as the national organisation did in the 1930s. Unlike that period, however, the Federation would find cause to re-open its industrial file in 1983.
The ‘Federal Labour Power’ and teachers The High Court in the Jumbanna Coal Mine v Victorian Coal Miners Association case (1908) had ‘oxygenated’ the new federal industrial system by finding that the term ‘industrial disputes’ expressed in the federal ‘labour power’, Section 51 (xxxv) of the Constitution and in Section 4 of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904, had a broad application to the workforce. As Justice O’Connor stated, ‘industrial dis-
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
putes’ was commonly understood to mean in Australia ‘every kind of dispute between master and workmen in relation to any kind of labour’ (6 CLR 1908, p. 366). There was one principal limitation to the term’s application: public employees at a state or local level were prohibited from federal coverage because of the Court’s adherence to the doctrine of inter-governmental immunities. This guaranteed the states protection from Commonwealth interference so that they could maintain an independent existence as members of a federal system of governance. This doctrine favouring state rights in public employment was an unrealistic view of labour relations where many workers employed by the states or public utilities contributed directly to the emerging national economy. The most obvious example was state railway workers (Spaull, 1997a). The Court eventually acknowledged this inconsistency and discarded most of the immunities doctrine in favour of the federal labour power. In a series of judgements between 1919 and 1928, it found that many classes of manual public employees, as well as some white-collar workers, could have their terms and conditions of employment governed by federal arbitration. But they had to satisfy a new Courtimposed test, a ‘capital and labour test’, that their work either contributed directly to the production and distribution of goods and services or that their work was incidental to these productive and distributive processes. The element of judicial uncertainty was the reason behind FSSTAA’s application to the Court for a ruling on the question of whether state school teachers in Victoria and Tasmania could obtain a federal industrial award. The Court’s decision in the Federated State School Teachers’ Association of Australia v Victoria ORS case (1929) saw the ultimate expression of this ‘capital and labour’ test. It found that as education was not an industry (and therefore its industrial dispute was not a dispute in industry), the teachers’ application for a federal award must fail. Although the Court’s decision was infected with circular and ambiguous arguments the State School Teachers case came to occupy a central place in federal labour law for the next 50 years By the late 1960s, Commonwealth financial assistance to schooling had become an accepted reality in Commonwealth–state relations. It is not surprising to find that in this same period the ATF considered the possibilities of federal awards for school teachers, and the necessary first step of registration of a new teachers’ organisation in the federal commission. The latter was the most pressing on the Federation’s deliberations because it had allowed the FSSTAA’s registration (of 1924) to lapse in 1950. The emergence of the Commonwealth’s
THE MAKING OF THE AUSTRALIAN TEACHERS UNION
7
involvement in education was predicated on fundamental change in taxation powers in favour of the Commonwealth Treasury (after 1941) and the rising popular demand for substantial improvement in school resources. This led to a major expansion, from both Commonwealth and states’ funds, of buildings, equipment, special programs and teacher education and professional development. But teachers’ salaries and other rewards had not attracted the same largesse; indeed in a period of high inflation, teachers’ real wages had declined. The Federation felt that one possible way to arrest this decline was to transfer determinations of these conditions from state industrial tribunals to the federal commission. But was this possible at law? This was the central question addressed by the Federation’s internal committees in 1970, and again in 1974. The exercise was far from systematic and relied heavily on opinions from industrial lawyers. These opinions acknowledged the use of the State School Teachers decision in subsequent case law and the body of restraints which these decisions would have on a new application from teachers to enter the federal arena. The ATF was left with only the negative conclusions of the advice, which read: ... the chances of overcoming this hurdle appear to us to be slight and, when taken with the jurisdictional difficulties, make it most unlikely that the ATF could obtain a Federal award and certainly a lengthy hearing and series of appeals could be anticipated. We do not consider the prospects of ultimate success justifying taking action. (QTU paper for ATF Review, 1970)
The affiliates were naturally suspicious of federal registration, but the advice that it might well be a waste of resources was enough to convince them of its inappropriateness. No such difficulties with registration would be encountered for teachers employed by the Commonwealth Teaching Service in the ACT and the Northern Territory, and the ATF endorsed their unions’ applications. Had the Federation been adventurous and sought registration and/or a review by the court of whether education was an industry, it may have found the court more receptive to its pleas than in 1929; by the mid-1970s the post-industrial economy and the corresponding predominance of non-manual and professional work had produced public claims for a more centralised regulation of wages policy. The High Court signalled gradually that earlier courts may have strayed too far from the wide definition of ‘industrial disputes’ contained in Jumbanna.
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
The High Court’s invitation in the early 1980s to parties to seek a resolution of this dilemma did not go unnoticed (Spaull 1997A). However, the invitation was not taken up by the ATF nor the state teacher unions. They were either satisfied with their place in state regulation or bent on reforming their systems (Spaull & Hince, 1986). Within the national teachers’ body the organisational disarray which accompanied the decision to affiliate with the ACTU also meant that the Federation was unprepared to approach the commission. The new direction of arguments in the impending Social Welfare Union case (153 CLR) of 1982 and 1983 obviously aroused the interest of industrial lawyers who acted as advisers to public sector unions, including teacher unions. At the January 1983 ATF executive meeting, the possibility of a major change in the High Court’s thinking on industrial disputes was raised as a point of information. The Federation felt that the issue should be explored more systematically and become the focus of an internal seminar. This would be held on 7 April 1983, a month after the Social Welfare Union had presented its arguments to the High Court. The ATF seminar considered three papers: one on the legal situation in relation to the concept of industrial disputes; another on practical issues in any registration application and federal awards; and a third paper on the potential for other unions to seek coverage of teachers, namely other education unions, including the ITF. The ATF’s research officer (Simon Marginson), supported by the general secretary of the State School Teachers Union of Western Australia (SSTUWA), wanted to draft a set of rules for a federal union as a protective measure against rival claims as soon as possible, but most of the other affiliates’ representatives could not see the point of immediate federal registration. Indeed, some hinted (inaccurately) that the seminar may have been ‘a Victorian idea’ for its three unions to amalgamate and secure a federal award. The issue was left on hold with a request to bring back to the ATF further materials and opinions from the affiliates (ATF Seminar, 7 April 1983). It was not until early June that the Federation approached its solicitors (Holding Redlich) with a host of questions relating to the options that it could pursue if the High Court’s decision on the Social Welfare Union case were to return to a broader definition of ‘industrial disputes’. The Federation’s solicitors responded soon after, but by then the High Court had handed down its Social Welfare Union decision. The Court held unanimously that it was prepared to accept a broader interpretation of ‘industrial dispute’ in the Constitution than had
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been afforded since State School Teachers. Although it did not overturn the decision, it indicated that it was prepared to return to an earlier and more realistic application of the ‘labour power’ as expressed in the Jumbanna decision of 1908. As the Court stated: It is, we think, beyond question that the popular meaning of ‘industrial disputes’ includes disputes between employees and employers about the terms of employment and the conditions of work... We reject any notion that the adjective ‘industrial’ imports some restriction which confines the constitutional conception of ‘industrial disputes’ to disputes in productive industry and organised business carried on for the purpose of making profits. (153, CLR, 1908, p. 312)
Commentary on the Social Welfare Union (1983) decision was almost euphoric. The Financial Review claimed it was the beginning of an ‘industrial relations revolution’. Other observers felt that it the most significant decision in industrial relations for many years (Spaull, 1997A). Ron McCallum, then teaching law at Monash University, wrote that the decision would be regarded as ‘a truly momentous opinion ... in which it overturned the post-1919 case law and reinstated the Jumbanna principles in all their glory’ (1984, p. 102).
Response to the Social Welfare Union decision Holding Redlich’s advice was that the Federation should create a new federal union as soon as practicable as a protective measure against possible unions’ raids for teachers’ coverage, and that questions about federal awards for teachers should be decided after registration had been obtained. The new union should be seen by the teacher unions as a ‘shell structure’, so that the state unions’ legal entities and autonomy were preserved along with the ATF itself. A small informal group within the Federation agreed to accept this advice, along with advice from the lawyers that other possible contenders, now including the Victorian Association of Teachers (see later in this chapter), non-government school teacher unions and even the TTF (which still had not re-joined the ATF), were interested in obtaining registration. The informal group believed that the ATF should move at once, because potential opponents, such as Victorian Association of Teachers (VAT), could make a quick application and ‘the order of applications makes a tactical difference’ in the registration process (16 June 1983 meeting, Federal Registration Papers).
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
A second ‘federal registration’ seminar was held a month later when other issues were addressed including the place of the ACTTF and the Northern Territory Teachers Federation (NTTF) in the proposed new union, as they were both already registered in the commission and parties to its awards for teachers in the territories. The seminar concluded that the ATF should create a new union and seek its registration, but that the final decision must be left to the annual conference or a special conference. It also agreed that existing registrations by affiliates including those of the territories’ unions should be preserved ‘at this stage’, but once the new union was registered, complete with state and territory branches, the Federation should be dissolved. On the issue of federal awards, it was decided to retain this as a long-term option (ATF Executive, July 19 1983, Agenda item 3.4). The Federation Executive established a working party elected from its own ranks and a reference group of national and state officials and lawyers. Both groups met regularly throughout the second half of 1983 and worked on a proposed constitution and the rules of governance and administration necessary for the operation of a federal union. They were confronted with unexpected challenges. For instance, after it was discovered that a lengthy plebiscite would be required of the territories’ unions contemplating joining the new union, it was decided to proceed with the registration of the Union and the NTTF and ACTTF could decide on amalgamations later on (Warton, NTTF to Bluer, 1 Nov 1983, Federal Registration Papers). Then the Technical and Further Education Teachers Association (TAFETA) indicated that it was not willing to join the new union, possibly as a branch, unless its autonomy was guaranteed. It also pointed out that the TAFE area was bound to attract the attention of other trade unions already holding federal registration. Again it was decided that for the moment it was better to exclude TAFE members from the membership of the new union, but ensure that it remained within the Federation’s orbit. Nevertheless, there were some preliminary victories for the Federation. The most important ones were that the Tasmanian state teachers had rejoined the ATF and therefore would not seek federal registration, and that the newly formed Independent Teachers Federation of Australia) (ITF or ITFA) indicated that it would register a federal union which only sought coverage of teachers in non-government schools. It was from ITF that the Federation discovered that a new teacher union, the Teachers Association of Australia (TAA) had been formed and it had filed for registration on 3 November 1983. It sought coverage of all types of school teachers in Australia (Marginson
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to Bluer re discussions with Pat Lee, 15 Nov 1983, Federal Registration Papers). TAA was formed by approximately 30 Victorian teachers who were members of the Victorian Affiliated Teachers Federation (VATF) formerly known as VAT. VAT had been established in 1976 to offer an alternative organisation for teachers who were disenchanted by the three militant and, in its words, ‘undemocratic’ and ‘party political’ teacher unions. Despite only modest recruitment, mainly from secondary teachers who comprised over 50 per cent of its membership, VAT was recognised by the Victorian Teachers Tribunal. Following the abolition of the Teachers Tribunal in 1981, and the election of the Cain Labor government in 1982, VAT lost its formal access to the state industrial relations system and the Minister for Education. This situation forced VAT’s leadership (now called the VATF) to form and seek the federal registration of TAA (Spaull, 1992). The ITF also informed the ATF that the emergence of TAA was part of a larger campaign by the National Civic Council to remove more ‘radical’ elements in several state-based independent teacher unions. In this it had won the sympathy of some Catholic school employers. B.A. Santamaria, the leader of the National Civic Council, did not deny this strategy and admitted later that TAA was formed to oppose the emergence of the new union of the ATF – ‘dominated by a combination of Marxist, radical feminist and secularist elements – and the ITFA, whose leadership in some states is surprisingly made up of former anti-Vietnam student activists of the 1970s, whose educational policies ... were [recently] identical with those of the ALP’ (B.A. Santamaria, Australian, 28 Feb 1994). The unmasking of TAA with its ‘Santamarian grouper’ support served as a catalyst to bring the ATF’s affiliates onside to the new union quicker than might have been normally expected in the somewhat ponderous Federation. By the time the affiliates met in annual conference (January 1984) there was widespread support for the immediate establishment of the new union, to be called the Australian Teachers Union (ATU), and to have this union registered by the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. But as the fine details of rules were still being formulated by the Federation’s working parties, the annual conference agreed to endorse in principle the transitional rules of the ATU and its application for registration. At the suggestion of the NSWTF, the conference resolved that the ATF executive, in conjunction with the affiliates, finalise the rules and these be submitted to a special conference later in 1984.
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
The ATF delegates to conference had no doubts, however, as to the future direction of the new union. First, its proposed federal conference would have the power to seek federal awards, but only with the consent of relevant branches; similarly, branches could seek an initial award but only with consent of the federal conference. The ATU, however, would not press for any awards until after registration had been achieved and then only if all state branches and state unions agreed to this course of action. Second, the Union’s new branches would operate alongside existing state unions. No pressure would be placed on these unions to merge into ATU branches but eventually the Union would replace the Federation as the sole national organisation of publicly employed teachers. Finally, the Union would recruit members directly through its branches. These rules and other organisational matters formed the basis of the Australian Teachers Union’s application for registration that was filed in the federal commission on the 13 February 1984. The only serious internal dispute on the wording of the original application came from 13 women teachers who, as members of the new NSW branch, wrote that they were ‘disgusted’ to find on reading the relevant papers that the new unions’ federal conference delegates and the executive members and officers were men. They continued: ‘We regard with disbelief the fact that women are not represented at all in the proposed structure of the Federal level’ (Darelle Duncan et al. to Bluer, 7 February 1984, ATF Executive Minutes). This ‘glaring oversight’ was not a deliberate attempt to prevent women from being represented on the Union’s governing bodies; it had occurred because at that time all the ATF executive and officers were men. The issue of women’s representation in the Union, an issue that was not confined to the federal body, dominated the agenda of the ATF special conference and the ATU’s executive meetings for most of the first half of 1984 (Turtle, Seymour, Anley, Barnard, & Gilbert, 1984). The debates were intense, even emotional. The meetings, especially the special conference, were almost chaotic, and all the time the ATF’s united purpose, to create a new federal union, was dissipated by the potential fragmentation around the issues of gender politics and state affiliates’ rights within the Federation. Finally, legal counsel’s advice to the national office prevailed over advice to the NSWTF: if the Union drastically revised its rules before the registrar so that increased representation of women could occur, then it was probable that the Union’s application for registration would fail. The Union’s leadership accepted this argument, but as a concession its executive adopted a general
THE MAKING OF THE AUSTRALIAN TEACHERS UNION
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resolution of support concerning the role of women members in the ATU and established a working party (with a majority of women members) to explore all options for creating gender balance in the governing bodies of the federal union and its branches (ATF Report 1984, p. 11; ATU, Executive Minutes 1984). Later, in October 1984, the Federation sponsored a Women’s Conference to discuss the future participation of women in the ATF and ATU. (This conference would become an annual event.) In 1986 the first ATF Women’s Officer was appointed. The women’s arguments that they should have greater representation at the ACTU Congress had little immediate impact: the percentage of women on the ATF delegation increased from 46 per cent in 1983 to 48 per cent at the 1987 Congress. This was not an auspicious start to a union that hoped to represent state school teachers, an occupation which by 1984 consisted of about 60 per cent female workers. The special conference formally agreed to the final constitutional objectives and rules of the federal union on the 7 April 1984. These were also forwarded to the Industrial Registrar, Melbourne. The dilemma for the Union was that if the registrar followed usual practice he would take the TAA case first, and the objections to TAA’s registration from the ATU and ITF would follow. This process would lead to a number of separate stages in the registration proceedings. At a preliminary hearing with the registrar the Union’s advocate (Hinkley) was able to convince him that the other two unions should have the right to seek leave to intervene in the TAA’s hearing (beginning in July) which had been set aside to discuss the ‘industry question’. He also persuaded the registrar that, as no dates for a TAA hearing had been set, dates also be set for the ATU to be heard even though TAA submitted their application well before the ATU. In these circumstances the Union felt ‘there was a good chance that this procedure means that we have effectively run over the TAA and will probably be in a position of putting our substantive case before they get an opportunity to put theirs’ (Bluer report on hearing 16 May 1984, ATF Executive Minutes). As anticipated by the Union, the registrar did not proceed in detail with the registration hearings until the question of defining an education industry had been settled. This required a referral to a Full Bench hearing of the commission early in 1985. Its decision demonstrated that although it was not prepared to state that the Social Welfare Union decision had overturned the State School Teachers decision it did find that education was an industry because schools provided community
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
services. Moreover, it was also susceptible to industrial disputes that disrupted the delivery of these services within the meaning of ‘disruption of services’ found in the High Court’s 1983 judgement. Therefore, it found that the three new teachers unions were ‘registrable’ within the meanings of industry found in the Act. The Queensland government subsequently challenged this decision. It sought to stop any further registration proceedings on the grounds that (i) the commission was wrong in finding that teaching was part of an industry; and (ii) state teachers were part of the administrative (or regal) functions of state and therefore, under the Constitution, teaching services were immune from federal industrial powers and jurisdiction. Because the matters raised by the Queensland appeal had a constitutional basis it was necessary to refer the case to the High Court. The Court considered the case in July 1985. The Queensland government was supported in its appeal by the New South Wales and Tasmanian state governments whose actions appeared to be primarily defensive and aimed at preventing the federal unionisation of senior education department officials. The ATU argued that the commission’s decision had been correct because it had been based on the Social Welfare Union definition of an ‘industry’, which had been reached earlier by the High Court itself. In June 1986 the High Court unanimously dismissed the Queensland appeal against the registration of federal teachers unions (160 CLR 430). The fate of the Union’s registration and that of the ITF were never in doubt once the High Court found that education was an industry within the meaning of the Constitution and the Act. In December 1986 the Registrar approved the ATU and ITF’s applications. The TAA’s registration was more problematic and eventually its application was unsuccessful (Spaull, 1992). The entry into the federal system had been expensive, time consuming and disruptive for the Union in terms of its internal and external relations. True, the Union’s determination to remove TAA had caused it to become a party to the longest registration case in Australia’s industrial history. The overall costs to the Union had been a weakening of its promise to become an effective federal union that would maintain the loyalty and material support of teacher unions in the states and territories. But the cumbersome and sometimes arcane ways of the federal system did not generate a confidence in the Federation’s decision to create a new union. Moreover, the Union had not made a good start in its new relations with other education unions. In particular, its decision to object to the registration of Federation of
THE MAKING OF THE AUSTRALIAN TEACHERS UNION
15
Australian Universities Staff Associations (FAUSA) on the grounds that it also wanted coverage of higher education teachers in New South Wales soured fraternal cooperation within the education industry. As the Union itself observed ‘relationships between FAUSA and ATF (but more particularly NSWTF) have been close to breaking point’ (Foggo to Bluer, 18 June 1985, Federal Registration Papers). The ATU obtained joint coverage in New South Wales. The situation did not improve when the ATU sought later to be a party to the first federal awards for university and college academics in New South Wales and Queensland and was again successful. The inter-union politics also put to rest the NSWTF’s somewhat derisive claims that in the future FAUSA and the Federated Clerk’s Association might benefit from an amalgamation with the Union. The registration of the Union under the provisions of the Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 established the Union as a distinct incorporated entity. Having achieved this legal status the Union was afforded the protection of the federal industrial relations system, providing that its rules and behaviour as a trade union conformed to the Act. But the two critical questions in the Union’s formation remained unresolved. In what ways would the Union access the powers of the federal commission? And what would be the future place of the Federation in national teacher unionism? As Robert Bluer had accurately prophesised in 1983: ‘what federal registration will unambiguously do is make all our lives more complex’ (ATF Annual Report 1984, p. 15).
Union records consulted ATF Annual Conference Reports and Papers, 1944–89, Noel Butlin Archives Centre, the Australian National University, Canberra (hereafter NBA) Z219, Boxes 19–28; 253–7 ATF Executive Minutes, Papers and Decisions, 1981–88, NBA, Z219, Boxes 258–69 ATU Federal Registration Papers 1983–91, AEU files 31.1.4.1 to 31.7.1 ATU Federal Executive Meetings 1984–91, AEU files 1.7.1 to 1.7.9
2 Whither the Federation? (1984–92) In some respects Federal Registration will change the ATF considerably. For the first time it will have flesh and blood members. It will be part of a highly regulated industrial environment which will impact considerably on its governing bodies, elections, officers, etc. It will have the capacity to seek and obtain Federal awards for some or all of its members. It has the potential to be the first national industrial organisation of teachers in Australia. In reality, at least for the foreseeable future, it will be none of these things. Robert Bluer, 1984
The dissolution debate The next stage in the union’s development was to replace the Federation with the Union as the national organisation of publicly employed teachers. The formation of the Union had been orchestrated to meet the statutory requirements for federal registration, but during this process there was widespread reticence among affiliates towards exploring the long-term implications of the registration on both the old and new teacher organisations. Besides, the registration process taxed the minds of the national leaders and forced them to concentrate on the immediate and short-term. Finally, the Federation was faced with a number of external pressures that kept it focused on political, not organisational, issues. The main challenges were the Federation’s relationships with the new Labor government and its status within the ACTU. 16
WHITHER THE FEDERATION? (1984–92)
17
The Federation’s dealings with the Labor government between 1983 and 1986 were particularly unyielding as the government refused to create a special relationship with the Union and treated it as a pressure group on the margins of both the labour movement and the education polity. This was especially true of the behaviour of the federal minister for education (Senator Susan Ryan) who the Federation expected to be more receptive, certainly more open, to the Union’s representations. As a result, the Federation could not persuade the government to call a moratorium on the level of funding to non-government schools, nor could it convince the government that it should reject the growing free market rhetoric which advocated both deregulation and privatisation of education systems (see Chapter 6). The emerging Federation’s relationship with the ACTU also posed difficulties for the union. The ACTU initially continued to deal with the Federation’s affiliates and it took some years before the Federation developed an effective working relationship with the ACTU, especially on an officer-to-officer basis. Similarly, the Federation’s obvious lack of experience in industrial matters and its historical separation from the culture of industrial unions meant that, despite its size in the ACTU, it did not have the strength of persuasion or action necessary to become a key player in ACTU affairs. For its part, the ACTU did not take seriously the Federation’s views in the early 1980s and certainly not its uneasiness about embracing the Australian Labor Party (ALP)/ACTU Prices and Income Accord. Nevertheless, the Federation understood that an effective working relationship with the peak council would take time and that it should be prepared to be seen as a new contributor to the ACTU, rather than expect the ACTU to come to the Union. The Federation’s attempt to become more closely aligned to the ACTU dictated its decision to leave its Canberra headquarters. Bluer proposed a move to either Sydney or Melbourne as the cost of maintaining the ATF secretariat in Canberra had escalated and the need for modern office facilities had become critical. Affiliates were suspicious of these proposals because it was felt that it would give either New South Wales or Victorian affiliates undue access to and perhaps influence over the Federation. But the ATF leadership argued that the Union’s political roles and industrial profile (once the Union obtained registration) would be enhanced by transferring the office to Melbourne. After the annual conference agreed narrowly, following a vote on state lines, the Federation moved to Melbourne offices in Carlton in December 1985 (Australian Teacher, March 1985).
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
The move to Melbourne represented a symbolic transformation of the Federation. It was expanding physically in terms of national staff and facilities and, more importantly, it became expansive in outlook. It was elevating its industrial orientation, not only as part of its ACTU affiliation and the registration hearings, but as part of its own responses to the restructuring of public education governance and funding measures. It also broadened its research and discussion on education questions and acknowledged such critical concerns of the 1980s as women’s issues and Aboriginal education, through the appointment of specialist officers. The Federation had escaped its self-imposed doldrums of the late 1970s and the affiliates, or most of them, were now prepared to support and pay for a more pro-active organisation and one that sounded and even acted like a genuine national teacher organisation. Eventually, the Federation would have to deliberate on the question of whether the Union would replace the Federation as a national teacher organisation. Bluer opened up the initial discussion in his report to the 1986 annual conference, by calling for an executive working party to explore future models for the organisation. He reminded the Federation that when the Union had been established it was agreed that eventually it would become the vehicle for the national voice of state school teachers and the Federation would be dissolved. The legal costs of the registration case and the existence of the two federally registered territory unions which were members of the Federation, but not of the Union, and could not be until they amalgamated with the Union, required careful planning. During the first half of 1986, Bluer and Di Foggo, the ATU industrial officer, developed these thoughts into a position paper. They made the following observations: that the Federation had inherent weaknesses as a national organisation, not because it’s affiliated state unions were strong but because the structures and processes they established to form a Federation were weak. Moreover, the states tolerated this weakness because they were suspicious of each other. They feared an increase in national officers’ power, not because it would create a new and independent power-base, but because of affiliate alliances with this power-base. The internal, systematic problems of the Federation, they argued, found expression in the Federation’s relationships with the federal government because the Labor Party and the ACTU saw the ATF as lacking an effective industrial function. To ignore this modern reality was at the organisation’s peril. Bluer proposed that the formal act of dissolution be at the ATF annual confer-
WHITHER THE FEDERATION? (1984–92)
19
ence in January 1990, preceded by a transitional stage of two years when the territory unions could complete amalgamation proceedings and the Union replace the Federation’s affiliations with the ACTU and the international teacher body. Blur and Foggo’s paper was challenged by an alternative proposition put to the working party by Arch Bevis, the assistant secretary of the Queensland Teachers Union (QTU). In 1983 Bevis accepted that with registration of the Union the Federation would eventually be dissolved. But by 1986 he was convinced that premature dissolution of the Federation would inflict immeasurable harm on state unions, and would heavily politicise the new Union at both the national level and in the state branches. In effect, it would increase the likelihood of the leadership of state branches of the Union not being the same as that of the state union. This would be a particular problem for teacher unions in New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia, when the registration of the Union would provide them dual industrial registration with the federal commission and registrations with their own state commissions. Separate legal entities in these states had the potential for divisive competition in teacher unionism. Bevis also tackled the challenge of federal awards, correctly predicting that the introduction of a federal award for school teachers would have more impact on state unions than the act of registration. Assuming the Union obtained registration, nothing in the current situation would prevent a Federation affiliate asking the new Union to apply for a teachers’ award in a particular state. In sum, Bevis argued for a continuation of the status quo and that any major changes in union power should be slow, evolutionary and done with a full consideration of the needs of state unions (Working Party on Future Models of Organisation, June 1986, Papers, ATF/AEU Review). Other options which were canvassed were either slight modifications to the ‘status quo’ model or the ‘Developing the ATU’ model proposed by Bluer. On one extreme of the spectrum was the ‘do nothing at this stage’ position and the other extreme was to develop the Union not only at the national level but also to replace all the state unions as branches of the Union (V. Baueris, The Five Options, Education, 16 March 1987). The initiative stayed with the ‘timetabled approach’ of Bluer and Foggo (especially after the Union obtained its registration in February 1987) until the intervention of the NSW Teachers Federation. The NSW Teachers Federation, as the largest constituent of the teacher union movement in Australia and arguably its most effective
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
activist body, was also the key player in the national federation. It had always belonged to the Federation; it had provided most of the resources and was the centrifugal force in the development of national policies and political campaigns. It also opposed the idea of federal awards in the 1980s because of its own secure position in the established state industrial relations system, a position which it willingly shared with an emerging power in the Federation, the QTU. Both large, state-orientated unions, they viewed any attempts to strengthen the national organisation especially in its industrial roles, with suspicion. In Queensland’s case, this stemmed from its inherent distrust of ‘southern’ organisations. New South Wales’ view was based on two perceptions: that it was a superior organisation tactically than any other teacher union and that the national organisation could not deliver anything that the NSWTF could not, nor did it have the necessary leadership qualities to act on the NSWTF’s behalf (Porter, 1987, pp. 62–7). In return, the ATF officers led by Bluer implied that the NSWTF attitude towards the national organisation was one of arrogance and dismissiveness, and it was one of several unions who regarded the ATF ‘as a plaything of affiliates and too often [it] is not accorded the seriousness it deserves’ (Bluer paper, ATF Executive Minutes, June 1988, p. 5). Bluer came to the Sydney seminar in April armed only with the conviction that his proposals for a planned dissolution of the ATF were logical and relevant to the changing Australian political and industrial scene. Nevertheless, he backed away from insisting that they adopt his plans for the new union. He conceded that not all the national officers supported his proposal and then declared: ‘... I shall oppose it [the single union] unless and until it is supported by the QTU and the NSWTF’ (ATF Seminar, April 1987, p. 1, ATF/ATU Review). New South Wales’ position, which represented the various attitudes of its leaders and senior officials, called for caution and delay, particularly in the gradual development of the Union alongside the existing Federation. The union’s women’s coordinator, Helen McGregor, also reminded the seminar of the Union’s initial attitude to women teachers and claimed that the Federation provided better opportunities for women’s representation than the Union. Rex Hewitt, another NSWTF officer, argued that any dissolution of the Federation should not proceed until each branch had at least 85 per cent membership (it was just over 50 per cent in the ‘best’ branches). He also argued that it was important for the healthy maintenance and extension of unionism that any move to ‘a fully operational ATU’ should be gradual to allow time to educate the rank and file about federal unions, allow solid repre-
WHITHER THE FEDERATION? (1984–92)
21
sentation of the branches in the federal structures and minimise the risks of co-registration problems. The only paper dissenting from the gradualist approach was from Van Davy, a former NSWTF and ATF president. He had developed a caustic view of state unions’ attitudes towards national organisations. Their leaders, he felt, did not appreciate the importance of the federal arena in education politics (as he had during his time on the Schools Commission) and that many in the NSWTF’s rank and file (and it is assumed in other state unions) were reluctant unionists when it came to national matters. ‘[They] don’t want to hear about women’s issues, aborigines and what is happening in Nicaragua’, he later recalled (Porter, 1987, pp. 55, 70). Van Davy’s paper, ‘Missing–One National Union’, urged disregarding caution because the state affiliates’ concerns were at odds with the political objectives of a national union. He endorsed the findings of other ATF leaders that the Federation ‘will only be taken seriously by the ACTU and government when the ATF can demonstrate nationally that it can deliver politically and industrially’ (Van Davy paper, April 1987, p. 3, ATF/ATU Review). The seminar, however, declared in favour of delay. The development of the Union should be in the ‘foreseeable future’, the same position the NSWTF had insisted on in 1983. The two organisations should operate separately with the Federation being developed as a more effective national organisation. As well, a federal award should not be sought unless there was a genuine consensus among all unions and any award must not be at the expense of teachers’ conditions awarded in other jurisdictions. The final decision on the NSW Teachers Federation’s attitudes towards the future of the Union would be left to the members at an annual conference. One significant outcome of the NSWTF seminar was that the national executive adopted its request for the Federation to conduct a thorough review of the role and function of the ATF. In September 1987 it decided that the review by a working party would consider proposals for making the organisation (whether it be the ATF or the ATU) a more effective and efficient organisation, and whether the ATF should be replaced by the Union. This approach, although accommodating the gradualist position of the NSWTF and thereby slowing down the actual processes of dissolution, ensured that the momentum towards a planned replacement of the Federation continued. The Federation’s officers kept the pressure on the union to bring a decision about the future of the ATF to the 1988 January conference, even though the review would not be completed by then. Bluer intensified the arguments about the future place of the Union. He issued a
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
warning about the consequences of not moving quickly in a paper to a national seminar on the ATF/ATU in June 1987: The disadvantages in not taking such a step are not only the problems relating to a weak national organisation, but those relating to two weak national organisations which is what we currently have and what we would be left with should the status quo prevail. (Options for the ATU, 19 May 1987, ATF/ATU Review)
In October Bluer circulated another paper that demonstrated how the inherent weaknesses of the two organisations ensured that they were failing to respond to the new ‘Hard Times’ in Australia. He amplified this with a recitation of the impact of economic constraints on federal funding of schools, the restructuring of the federal and state education departments, the increasing privatisation of school systems and the wages ‘iron collar’ that had been imposed on salaried workers as a result of the Accord. Bluer’s arguments motivated a minority group in the NSWTF, led by Van Davy and two officials, Sharan Burrow and Greg Smith, to ask the NSWTF to modify its opposition to the single union movement. Earlier, Rob Durbridge, a union activist at Bathurst, had chastised the NSWTF’s leadership for its reluctance to discuss openly the future role of the ATU, and claimed that his union was far too defensive in its attitudes towards the ATU (Education, 17 August 1987). Davy, Burrow and Smith also called on their colleagues who would be attending the ATF annual conference to examine the complex issues surrounding the future of the Union. They took on board Bluer’s warnings about the contextual changes in Australian education and claimed there was a ‘compelling need’ to develop the Union irrespective of the issue of federal awards for teachers. Their detailed paper was prefaced with this plea: Unless we willingly and consciously construct the ATU now, on our terms, we believe we will at any rate be compelled to do so by the shaping forces exerted through pressures for Federal awards, the competing interests of unions in the public and private sectors, and the inevitable political distortions arising from attempting to keep the Federally-registered national teachers union weak and irrelevant. (Burrow et al., Oct 1987, ATF/ATU Review)
The ATF annual conference acknowledged the need to resolve the organisational issue sooner rather than later, but not until the next annual conference, and not before the states had been surveyed as part of the review and had their own opportunities to consider the available options. It supported in principle the Union becoming the domi-
WHITHER THE FEDERATION? (1984–92)
23
nant teacher organisation at the national level. At the same conference the ATF agreed to recommend to the Union that it approve the lodging of an industrial claim by the Tasmanian branch in the federal commission. The survey of the Federation’s affiliates (which also included responses from the national officers) was conducted between February and March 1988. It sought responses on the operations of the ATF and the future development of the ATU. Not all affiliates responded to the survey and those who did respond did so in different manners. On the work and possible enhancement of the Federation, only the ACTTF believed that the ATF was operating effectively. Other criticisms of the ATF included a lack of clearly defined functions and a lack of a systematic approach to respond to what the NSWT saw as its failure to act as a national lobbyist. Similarly, the affiliates felt that the ATF could develop a more systematic approach to issues like women teachers’ rights, Aboriginal education and the TAFE sector if it had more resources (NSWTF said it had too many). The Federation’s officers felt that more attention should be paid to media liaison and national intervention in state education debates. On the question of a single union, the TTF and the NTTF wanted an immediate dissolution of the Federation and the ACTTF wanted a dissolution as soon as possible. The QTU again rejected any timetabled approach ‘other than in the long term’, SAIT just wanted a much stronger body, but not necessarily by precluding the ATF, and the NSWTF wanted to see whether the effectiveness of the ATF could be improved, before a decision on dissolution was made. As it stated: ‘[in the current situation it] was not prepared to defer issues to an ineffective body ... and in the national arena the NSW Teachers Federation operates more effectively than the ATF. The national officers’ group refrained from commenting on this question because in their view it was a “political question”’ (ATF Executive, 22–24 June 1988). Marginson, the ATF research officer, had been more forthcoming than his colleagues. In the case of the ATF’s operations, he argued that it would become a ‘white elephant’ if the NSWTF remained unwilling to ‘include’ the authority of the ATF to develop as a national organisation. As to the future role of the new union, Marginson suggested that it was in the industrial, political and educational interests of teachers to support the establishment of a single union ‘with state and territory branches and probably at this stage with a mixture of Federal and State awards ... Any other preference reflects clinging to old habits or fear of losing personal power’ (Marginson’s submission to ATF/ATU Review, 4 March 1988, p. 2).
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
As no clear consensus could be found from the survey the review committee was not prepared to recommend in June 1988 that the Federation would be replaced by the Union ‘in the near future’. Nevertheless, the one element of urgency was the status of the territory unions. Both wanted the Federation dissolved immediately so that they could commence amalgamation processes to join the Union. In the case of the NTTF, it was confronted with a new issue: the Industrial Relations Bill 1988 was proposing that unions with less than 3000 members be required to amalgamate within three years or risk loss of registration in the new Australian Industrial Relations Commission. Bluer believed that these issues had to be addressed urgently, even though he had conceded that the Federation would not be dissolved in 1989. (He had also indicated that he intended to resign as general secretary in October 1988 so that he could take up a position on the National Board for Employment, Education and Training.) The September executive meeting agreed with his assessment of the precarious situation of the NTTF and agreed to improve both the financial arrangements for the ATU and its membership drive in the branches (Issues paper, Sept 1988, ATF Executive Minutes.) But at the same meeting the executive agreed that it should propose to the annual conference that the ATF should be dissolved in January 1990, therefore the review committee was requested to redraft Bluer’s final paper to support the dissolution motion. This paper used much of the tenor of Bluer’s texts, but also noted that the pressure on the NTTF had been removed partly by the Industrial Relations Bill being amended to reduce union size from 3000 to 1000 members. It also spelt out the ways in which a dissolution of ATF would not impair the work of state organisations and concluded ‘... one thing is clear, the ATF cannot deal with the range of Federal issues that the ATU can. It cannot appear before the Commission. It is time we made the change’ (ATF Action Circular, 16 Nov 1988). The 1989 annual conference was to be the crucial test of the resolve of the Federation to dissolve itself. The actual meeting was presided over, for the first time, by Di Foggo as ATF president and Dave Robson who had replaced Bluer as general secretary in October 1988. Both were Victorians and both had been general secretaries (of the NTTF and the TTUV respectively). Foggo had cut her national teeth as the convenor of the ATF’s Aboriginal education committee (1982–85) and she had become the ATU’s industrial officer in 1984, thereby helping to steer through the Union’s registration application. Both Robinson and Foggo had come to the Federation’s leadership positions as com-
WHITHER THE FEDERATION? (1984–92)
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mitted members of the movement to replace it with the Union. The debate on the dissolution motion was earnest but measured. In its initial stages it was obvious that there was entrenched division: Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and the two territory unions supported the dissolution, while New South Wales, Western Australia and TAFETA challenged the need for haste, and sought more explanations and further discussion among the affiliates. The NSWTF’s ‘extreme’ position was that a dissolution in 1990 could not be contemplated because of the relatively low membership in the Union, its lack of financial resources and the lack or organisational reforms to effect a smooth transition. Its executive had proposed that in the absence of these features the question of dissolution of the Federation should not be debated until January 1994 (Report to NSWTF, Conference 1989, p. 62, ATF/ATU Review). The matter was referred to a conference working party that reported back with a number of recommendations proposing more time and more opportunities to explore the transition arrangements and the effects of rule changes on affiliates. The conference unanimously endorsed these recommendations, but with the firm understanding that the Federation was to be phased out over a two–year period, and the ATU become the national organisation sometime in 1991. This actual decision on dissolution would be made by the 1990 annual conference (ATF Conference decision. 1989, pp. 93–4). Twelve months later the annual conference decided that the Union would take over as the dominant union representing school and TAFE teachers in Australia after the January 1991 conference. The Federation would be dissolved later in 1991. It would notify the ACTU and the WCOTP that the ATF affiliations would be replaced by the ATU, and that the Union would operationally support the amalgamation of the ACTTF and NTTF, the creation of a TAFE division in the ATU and rule changes that would ensure fair representation for women in the ATU. It also requested that the Tasmanian branch pursue the question of affiliation with the Tasmanian Trades and Labour Council (it was the only state organisation not affiliated with the union movement and therefore not belonging to the ACTU). It joined in 1990.
Conversion details The road to a single national union was slow and winding and it tested the patience of the most ardent Unionists. A sense of inevitability,
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
however, pervaded the organisations after January 1989; a mood, it must be noted, which did not reach the rank and file as they were embroiled in their own local struggles. The ATF/ATU still had campaigns to mount, policies to pursue and positions to defend against the unrelenting tides of restructuring in state education systems and the work of their teacher employees. Moreover, the two national organisations had to take the razor to their own operations to stem the increasing budget deficits that financed their operational costs (the ATF’s debt in 1988 was $144 000). To do this it adopted a five–year plan and extended its cost-sharing arrangements with affiliates to support the Darwin annual conference, the national campaign on salaries and the cost of sending additional delegates to overseas teachers’ conferences. It also decided that from 1991 onwards all annual conferences would be held in Melbourne (Queensland Teachers’ Journal, 21 Feb 1990). Foremost among the ATU’s struggles was the introduction of the second phase of its award restructuring campaign which required the Union to manage a national salaries campaign on behalf of the state and territory unions. This was critical to establishing a national perspective across jurisdictions, via salary benchmarks, to the local negotiations and adjudications for increased salaries to classroom teachers. A national campaign also served the Union’s end in that it provided ample opportunities for it to display its industrial talents and cooperative skills with the state organisations. Some Federation leaders in the mid-1980s felt this type of cooperative venture orchestrated from national headquarters was beyond the capacities of a federation structure, but here in the national campaign of 1989 and 1990 was a practical example of national leadership. That it was devoted to a wages struggle and closely related to the work practices of teachers in statecontrolled classrooms was even more impressive. The national salaries campaign was to become a defining moment in the Union’s short industrial history. How effective the campaign was in improving teachers’ conditions of work is a separate question that will be discussed in the next chapter, as will be the fate of its first claims in the federal commission for portability of employment entitlements and a practice teaching award. The emergence of the Union in the industrial arena did not generate a widespread demand from the states to attend to the Federation’s dissolution. Several states refused to move it off ‘the back burner’ as an issue for rank and file discussion (Robson, General Secretary, 1989 Report, p. 4., ATF Conference Papers) At another level, the local atten-
WHITHER THE FEDERATION? (1984–92)
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tion to effecting rule changes necessary for the operation of a federal union was not forthcoming as the national office expected. True, these processes of change were tedious and time-consuming, but it was important that the Union’s rules conform to the Industrial Relations Act 1988 and, especially, avoid the potential for creating two competing union bodies in the one state. As the Union had always respected the autonomy of its branches there were no provisions in its rules to permit direct intervention by its federal bodies in a branch if it failed to honour its obligations to the Union. These issues came to a head in the late 1980s and provided an intimate insight into the problems of creating a new federal union from the state structures of the existing teacher unions. An intense factional dispute arose in the SSTUWA in 1988, mainly over salaries’ issues and leadership personalities, and spilt over into the Western Australian branch of the Union. By 1990 the faction in power in the SSTUWA did not hold a majority position on the branch council and consequently the SSTUWA withdrew resources and support from the branch. There was a real threat of union fragmentation. This lack of cooperation between the state union and the branch ensured that the branch could not maintain its membership records, that teachers were not recruited to the branch by the SSTUWA and the branch could not pass on capitation fees to the Union’s federal office. The end result, claimed the Union, was that nearly 5000 members of the SSTUWA did not join the Union, creating a potential loss of considerable annual income to the federal body and the gross under-representation of Western Australian teachers on the federal conference. The Union used its federal officers to attempt a reconciliation between the SSTUWA and the Western Australian branch so that the branch could use the SSTUWA resources and facilities. After this failed it attempted to broker a new set of branch rules to bring the branch structure and elections in line with those of the SSTUWA. This had not occurred by the time the Union replaced the Federation as the national teacher organisation (Walsham, Federal Court Affadavit, 10 March 1993, SSTUWA file 3.12.15 ). There were similar complications in Victoria and Tasmania which, although not as serious or profound as West Australia’s situation, were also driven by the absence of teacher unity in these states. The Union hoped that the prevailing situation of the new union representing more than one state teacher organisation could be overcome by the different unions using the opportunity to create a single branch. In Victoria, the home of teacher union fragmentation, there was a distinct possibility in 1990 that the Victorian Teachers Union (VTU), VSTA and
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
TTUV would form a single federation and thereby create one Victorian branch. In fact the VTU and the TTUV did merge into a single union in 1990 but as the VSTA remained independent of the Federated Teachers Union of Victoria (FTUV) it was decided to retain the three Victorian sectional branches for the time being. An added dimension to this partial rationalisation in Victoria was the kindergarten teacher union, the Kindergarten Association of Victoria (KTAV). In 1989, in order to prevent a raid on its membership in the federal arena by the Federated Miscellaneous Workers Union, the KTAV had begun to explore a protective relationship with a Victorian branch of either the ATU or ITF. The KTAV had to decide on two strategies: whether to enter into a relationship with either the VTU or the Independent Teachers Union and whether this would be a way of affiliation or amalgamation. But the membership plebiscite would not be completed until late 1991, too late for the finalisation of the branch structures in Victoria (KTAV Newspaper, Oct 1990). The kindergarten teachers’ coverage issue in Victoria highlighted the complexity of reinventing the federal union in a period of widespread union restructuring. Indeed the Union’s conversion processes were occurring amid the first flush of the ACTU’s rationalisation or industry unionism campaign. As will be seen in the next section, the Union enthusiastically supported this phase of the campaign, even though it was a distraction from its central task: to become an effective federal union. If new groups of education workers were to become eligible to join the Union they would have to be either recruited or transferred by agreement with other unions. This latter strategy had both the potential and the actuality to create inter-union tension, something that the state bodies and the Union wished to avoid. At the state level, it gave cause for further delays in defining eligibility rules for the Union. Several affiliates went so far as to suggest that as a result of Union initiatives ‘good relations with other unions were at risk as a result of following the ACTU’s corporatist policies’ (ATF Action Circular, 2 May 1989.) Overall, it would take over 18 months (well into 1990) before the rule-making efforts of the Union satisfied the scrutinies of its lawyers. Other changes in rules relating to affiliation with the ACTU and WCOTP proceeded almost immediately once both peak-organisations provided assurances that it would be easy for the Union to replace the Federation providing it also met basic conditions of membership. The other major change was that the membership who had previously joined the Union through one of its branches, separately from
WHITHER THE FEDERATION? (1984–92)
29
joining a state union, would now join automatically when they joined a state union (an associated body) unless an individual indicated they did not wish to belong to the Union. A capitation fee, to be set by the new federal conference, was claimed on the state union as a proportion of a member’s total annual subscription to his or her state union (in 1991 the fee was struck at 4 per cent). This slow lane to conversion to the Union also restricted the way that ‘special interests’ in the teacher union movement– women, TAFE teachers, and the two territory unions – went about joining or enhancing their place in the Union. One of the few major innovations in Australian teacher unionism was the rapid emergence of women teachers’ participation in their unions in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Women in SAIT set the benchmark by obtaining equal representation on its governing bodies as part of the historic amalgamation of the men’s and women’s unions in 1951. Other women unionists had to wait until the springboard of International Women’s Year, 1975, and from this base the education and training of women teachers in unions became a feature of most unions’ activities and eventually led to women taking a more visible role in both the governance and operations of state unions (Spaull & Hince, 1986). This trickled over into the Federation so that in the 1980s a women’s caucus met before or during the annual conference, and later the Federation appointed a women’s officer (1986) who arranged regular meetings of state women’s officers and convened an annual women’s teacher conference (1984) which had the authority to bring resolutions to the Federation’s annual conference. These developments would have occurred in the Federation anyway, but they were accelerated by women’s responses to ‘the glaring oversight’ that not one single woman had been included in the formation of the Union’s executive. This mobilised a number of women activists in the state unions and at the first women’s conference they pressed for increased formal representation of women in the ATF. At the same time, state unions like the NSWTF made changes to its delegates’ composition so that Jenny George became a member of the Union’s executive in 1984 and more women became conference delegates to the Federation (NSWTF Annual Report 1984, p. 32). But this process was not widespread enough to ensure that an ATF conference resolution in 1985 calling for equal numbers of men and women at future conferences was carried. Thus at the 1986 conference only 23 per cent of the delegates were women, in contrast to some 30 per cent of representation on state bodies (Australian Teacher, Feb 1986 p. 4).
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
But the coordinative work of the ATF women’s officer (Joan Corbett) and the growing popularity of the Women’s Conference meant that women teachers were well positioned by 1987 to press further for changes in the representative basis of the Union. Earlier attempts to change the Union’s rules to accommodate this were not possible while the Union’s application for registration was before the commission. The opening position of the women was that a reconstituted Union, which would replace the Federation, should guarantee that half the available positions on all governing bodies would be allocated to women. Whether this was to be achieved by legislative mandate (as in SAIT) or by an educative process at the time of the Union’s elections was undecided. The legislative approach was fraught with problems, however, because the AIRC was extremely reluctant to accept this type of rule change. In the Australian Journalists Association decision 1988, the AIRC found that such provisions contravened the Sex Discrimination Act 1983. Exemptions, however, were available under this Act and the first response of the Federation was to support FAUSA’s approach to the government to amend the legislation (FAUSA to Senator Margaret Reynolds, 11 Oct 1988, AEU file 1.20.4). With the endorsement of the Federation’s annual conference 1989, the Women’s Conference explored the options for increasing participation in the Union and concluded that by legislative means 50 per cent of all elected positions in the Union, including senior officers and professional offices, should be allocated to women members (Corbett Discussion Paper, May 1989, AEU file 1.20.4). Subsequent legal advice suggested that a proportional representation model would have limitations when applied to the election of the Union’s executive and officers because of the small number of positions, but in the case of the annual conference it would be feasible to have elections based on proportional representation. This would give women over 60 per cent of the delegations, because of the number of women in the state teaching services and unions (Holding Redlich to ATU, 5 Sept 1989, AEU file 1.20.4). The ATF women’s officer then had discussions with the AIRC and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission which helped frame the conference recommendation to avoid problems associated with the Journalists Association decision. Part of the motion read: THAT the ATF reaffirm its commitment to the achievement of equitable representation of women in the ATU and to the eradication of policies and practices which contribute to discrimination against women. In
WHITHER THE FEDERATION? (1984–92)
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order to meet the target of at least 50% of women being delegates to the ATU Annual Conference by 1991, as recommended by the 1989 ATF Women’s Conference, the ATF supports the drawing up of appropriate changes to rules based on advice from the HREOC and which are directed towards the elimination of discrimination in the ATU. (ATF Action Circular, 19 Dec 1989)
At the conference the recommendation was widely supported in principle, but the QTU asked that it be deferred until the next conference so that its state council could deliberate. The issue returned to the 1991 conference and the recommendation was carried without dissent or abstention. In May 1991 the new rules meant that changes necessary to effect at least 50 per cent representation of women at Union federal conferences were approved by the Industrial Registrar. As Foggo claimed in announcing the decision: This rule is a splendid example of what can be done at a time when we are seeking to attract more women to unions and to make unions more democratic, representative and responsive to their members. ... The decision addresses national and international concerns about women’s low participation in trade unions, it reflects the long term commitment of the ATU to increase women’s involvement in all spheres of union activity and provides a model for other unions where women’s participation is low. (ATF Media Release, 2 May 1991, ATF Executive Minutes)
In the 1980s the Federation’s women’s caucuses provided genuine and expanded opportunities for women’s issues in education and teacher unionism to be retailed throughout the education and training systems. In many ways the ATF’s activities complemented the work of the state affiliates in advancing gender equity issues among the school and TAFE sectors as well as the unions themselves. In other ways the ATF’s embrace of these issues provided, for the first time, a national perspective, as well as new access to federal government and agencies and national organisations. The ATF’s women’s meetings, especially the Women’s Conference, were responsible for the education and training of women teachers and for teachers and active unionists in general. The fact that the women’s groups carried out key investigative roles which helped shape new policies for the Federation and its affiliates was important not only for women teacher unionists but also for the entire teacher union movement. This is most evident in the Federation’s adoption in 1988 of the Elimination of Sexism in Education and Employment Policy. This policy had been researched and developed by the Federation’s women’s
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
network over a three–year period. The end product was that the Federation took possession of a lengthy and detailed policy document, which became a blueprint for the unions’ (national and state) future actions. Framed by clear equal opportunity and affirmative action principles, the policy aimed to enhance the work, opportunities and rewards for women in school and TAFE systems. Furthermore, arising from this text, the ATF women’s group was later able to construct specific policy statements and strategies for the improvement in family leave provisions in teaching (1989), affirmative action criteria in career restructuring principles for school education (1990) and improved conditions of employment for part-time and casual teachers (1991). In another direction, the 1988 statement raised the issue of working women’s health. This served as a springboard for the ATF women’s meetings to prepare a measured though rounded policy on reproductive technology. This policy was supportive of women and men seeking solutions to infertility, but also warned of possible dangers to individuals and to the community of a blind adherence to new reproduction technology. The other dimension to the work of the Federation women’s groups was its ready responses to government and ACTU interests related to gender equity issues. The ATF women’s representatives quickly became key figures in both the ACTU Left Women’s Caucus and the ACTU’s Women’s Committee. Both groups helped to refine the ACTU’s plan for union reform by including as a major plank the union movement’s need to increase representation of women in individual unions’ governing bodies and the ACTU itself. The ATF women’s group was thus able to influence new ACTU policy approaches to superannuation provisions for women, improvements in childcare arrangements and the continuing lack of equal pay for equal work in the wider Australian workforce. The success of the ATF and other white-collar union women officers in these internal processes was obvious from the policy outcomes which occurred in the ACTU Congresses of the late 1980s; the difficulty was to convince the ACTU leadership that these should be implemented with the same vigour used to pursue its more traditional industrial policies. This was also true of the women education workers’ relationships with the Labor government in Canberra. The ATF women’s meetings were strategically placed to respond to governmental policy formulation in such areas as its National Policy for Education of Girls (1987) or National Policy on Women’s Health (1988). The Federation’s submissions to these inquiries were articulate and progressive, and their ideas found their way into the final documents. Moreover, its submissions
WHITHER THE FEDERATION? (1984–92)
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were widely respected by other women’s groups and the Minister in charge of the Status of Women in the federal government. Again the difficulty was in the translation into public action when the more senior ministers in education and employment were not as convinced of the merits of the Federation’s or other women’s group’s arguments. Nevertheless, the Federation’s newly defined relationships with the federal government, through the activities of its women’s group, provided the catalyst for one of the Federation’s few ‘significant happenings’ of the decade, the Women’s Conference of October 1988. The feminist movement of the 1980s was dominated by white middle-class agendas that had failed to address the problems of immigrant and Aboriginal women. Aboriginal women had complained that the feminist movement had done nothing to address their particular forms of oppression. This criticism was acted upon at the ATF’s Women’s Conference in 1987 when one of its most successful workshops discussed the education and training needs of Aboriginal women and girls. The workshop recommended that the issues it had raised should become the basis of a future exchange between white feminists in education and Aboriginal women. It was agreed that this become the focus of the next Women’s Conference. During 1988 the federal government announced that the National Aboriginal Education Committee would be abolished and its activities incorporated into a new Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. The government also intended to launch a new national Aboriginal education policy. The ATF feared that its consultative role in Aboriginal education would be lost, as would the role of Aboriginal women educators and community leaders. It was therefore decided by the ATF women’s officers group that the Women’s Conference would be devoted to the theme ‘Aboriginal Women and Education’. It would be held at a caravan park in Alice Springs and over three days bring together for the first time ATF women activists and Aboriginal and Islander teachers and other community leaders. The ATF’s Aboriginal education coordinator Pat Fowler said it was to be a meeting where, ‘We must share this expertise, and listen to each other with our hearts as well as our heads’. The Federation provided most of the financial support for the conference and this was supplemented by support from the federal government and financial assistance from the federal education bureaucracy. Over 300 women attended the conference and they drew up a series of resolutions aimed at protecting and enhancing the consultative role of local community leaders in Aboriginal education policy making, and advancing Aboriginal education. A number of these specific recommendations were to find their way into the federal government’s
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
new approach to the schooling and education of Aboriginal and Islander peoples (Ms Muffett, No. 37, 1989). For the Federation, the Women’s Conference was a defining moment in its long history. The Alice Springs meeting brought together in a highly emancipatory fashion two of its most neglected areas: women education workers and unionists, and Aboriginal education policy (see Chapter 4). A powerful symbiosis from this event would resonate throughout the Federation, and later the new Union, for the next decade. National teacher unionism in Australia, it might be said, came of age at Alice Springs in October 1988. Teachers in TAFE colleges mainly belonged to state teacher unions but these were also affiliated with TAFETA, which had joined the ATF in 1979 as its only special Association. TAFETA had largely autonomous powers in the Federation and it was not a branch of the new Union. In 1986, at TAFETA’s request, the Union allowed it to duplicate the associational activities which had existed between it and the Federation in the Union’s organisation (ATU Executive meeting, Jan 1986). In its submission to the ATF/ATU review, TAFETA argued that it was generally satisfied with these arrangements and the overall operations of the Federation except that it required more research support to meet the needs of its 15 000 members faced with the imposition of a new national training agenda. Later in 1989 it requested that two new officers be appointed to the Federation to cater for TAFE members’ interests. Like the NSWTF, which had the largest number of TAFE teachers nationally, TAFETA cautioned against undue haste in any dissolution of the Federation. Nevertheless, the increasing centralisation of training reforms by the Commonwealth government and the labour market challenges to TAFE workers meant that it was more sympathetic to the Union exploring the possibility of a national award for TAFE teachers, than was the NSWTF (Australian TAFE Teacher, No. 3, 1993). Within these contexts TAFETA considered its future place in the Union. Its deliberations in 1989 eventually focused on a divisional structure within the Union that would guarantee it a reasonable degree of autonomy in policy making and strategy matters. After legal advice, its attention was directed towards the amalgamation of the Telecom unions, a recent example of the union movement’s response to the ACTU’s pressure to introduce industry unionism into Australia labour relations. The Telecom case was useful in establishing the basis for a divisional approach at the national level, although TAFETA was less convinced of the need for a similar structure at the state level which would have meant separate TAFE branches instead of belong-
WHITHER THE FEDERATION? (1984–92)
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ing to the state teacher unions (Holding Redlich to Union, 31 March 1989, AEU file 1.20.7). A national division, however, would meet TAFETA’s three conditions for amalgamating with the Union: all ATU branches must be open to TAFE members; TAFE members in the states and territories must be able to directly elect delegates to the TAFE national bodies; and the Union must have the constitutional authority to make binding decisions on national TAFE matters. The January 1990 TAFETA conference (meeting before the Federation’s annual conference) proposed a set of principles and working measures that would create a TAFE division in the ATU, establish a National TAFE Council in the ATU (to replace the TAFETA conference) with the authority to deal with TAFE matters on behalf of the ATU, and appoint ATU officers with designated responsibilities for TAFE who would be elected by the Union’s federal conference. These proposals were endorsed by the ATF’s 1990 annual conference and opened the way for the Union to create a divisional structure for national membership through the ATU’s branches: a general division for members in schools and a TAFE division for members in TAFE colleges. The annual conference also supported the request for increased officer support in the national office before it became the federal office of the Union. Two areas of contention had to be addressed by TAFE leadership before the new rules for the amalgamation were to be finalised in 1991. The first problem was the unresolved issue of the degree of TAFE representation on the Union’s federal conference. This problem arose because there were not enough TAFE members in the smaller states to guarantee that each state or territory would be represented at the federal conference. After due consideration it was decided that TAFE members in the ACT, Northern Territory and Tasmania (but not Queensland) were to be grouped into a single electorate and would elect one delegate to the federal conference. The candidates from each of the other two states who failed to win election would be granted observer status with speaking rights at conferences (Australian TAFE Teacher, No. 2, 1991). The January 1991 Union Conference approved this approach to representation, as well as the other changes for the creation of TAFE division. The only serious objection arose after the conference, and indeed after the time allowed for amendments by the branches, when the TAFE association in the NSWTF objected to the system of proportional representation to elect delegates to the National TAFE Council. Its argument was that with 43 per cent of the national vote it would hold only about 30 per cent of the delegates to the national council and executive (Education, 15 April 1991). TAFETA
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replied that the group had had every opportunity to amend the rules and this view was upheld by a special federal conference in April 1991 (Main Provisions of ATU Rules TAFE Division, Jan 1992, AEU file 1.20.7). The other serious problem facing TAFETA in its amalgamation with the Union was the question of coverage of teachers in Queensland’s TAFE colleges. Most Queensland members belonged to the Queensland Professional Officers Association (QPOA), and both it and the QTU were members of TAFETA. The QPOA had covered technical school instructors in Queensland since 1918 and by 1989 had some 4700 teachers in its ranks; the QTU only covered commercial teachers in TAFE (some 95 members) and this was by a registered agreement (1986) struck in the state industrial commission. In the proposed arrangements QPOA teachers could not belong to the Union because they were a component of a state branch of the State Public Services Federation of Australia, a registered federal union. It was decided at the 1990 annual conference that this ‘local problem’ should not impede TAFETA’s merging into the Union, but the matter should be resolved by discussions in Brisbane between the QTU and the QPOA. The Union hoped that in the brave new world of industry unionism the QPOA would advise its TAFE members to join what would become the principal education union, already the dominant union, in representing the national interests of TAFE teachers. The QPOA had a different view of the problem and negotiations stalled after it informed the QTU that it and its TAFE members could see no value in transferring to the QTU. The Union and the QTU believed this ‘anachronistic position’ of the QPOA went against the realities of industry unionism, but there was no way around the problem unless they could obtain a favourable adjudication on a demarcation dispute from either the Queensland or federal commissions (ATU Executive Minutes, 9 May 1991). This would be a matter for future consideration, because the Union was fully aware that its grounds for obtaining a favourable verdict were tenuous given the history and relative size of its TAFE coverage in Queensland. The TAFE division of the Union was formally established in 1991 without the majority of TAFE teachers in Queensland joining the new Union. In November 1993 the QTU created a TAFE division in its state organisation (Queensland Teachers’ Journal, 25 Nov 1993). The two territory unions that had never belonged to the Union proceeded to discuss amalgamations with the Union once it was clear in 1989 that the single federal union would become a reality. Some urgency was required in the Northern Territory because the NTTF also
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explored the possibility of a local amalgamation with teachers in the university, colleges and independent schools. This did not eventuate so that after considering all necessary rule changes a special federal conference was able to approve the amalgamation of the Union and ACTTF and NTTF in March 1990. It was planned that the local organisations would be wound up and become branches of the Union, provided that the members of the two territory unions wanted amalgamation. Throughout all discussions, the federal officers stressed that many of these changes to the local organisations would be cosmetic because the Union’s philosophy and practice encouraged branch autonomy on most issues affecting local teachers. The advantage to these two small branches was obvious: that the resources and alliances of a large federal union would be able to readily assist the work of the teacher unions in the ACT and NT. The joint application for the amalgamation framework and the process for obtaining the teachers’ consent by way of an official secret ballot were approved by the AIRC in April 1990 (NTTF application, 21 March 1991, AEU file 1.20.5). Twelve months later the Australian Electoral Commission conducted a ballot of nearly 4000 members in the ACT and 1600 members in the NT. There was not much debate in either union about the proposed amalgamation and it caused little or no interest in the wider community in Canberra. In Darwin the seemingly civilised discussion was interrupted by the conservative Northern Territory News whose editorial on the 10 April argued that while the Territory teachers’ desire for amalgamation with the Union was understandable, it was premature and unwise. It warned that a future federal Coalition government, which it believed would be elected in 1993, would overturn Labor’s support for larger unions and under its industrial relations reforms encourage smaller enterprise-based unionism. The Union and the ACTU immediately responded claiming that the Territory teachers had wanted amalgamation with the Union for some years and that the newspaper’s attempt to influence the ballot was ‘heavy handed political interference in the democratic processes laid down by the unions and the Industrial Relations Act’ (ATF Media Release, 12 April 1991, ATF Executive Minutes). The two ballots proceeded and recorded an overwhelming vote for amalgamation: 97 per cent in the NT and 93 per cent in the ACT (Australian Teacher, May 1991.) In August 1991 the two territory teacher unions were dissolved and became the first two branches of the Union (Canberra Times, 2 August 1991). The two branches joined a Union that was now completely in control of all national union affairs in public education. The formal dissolution of the Federation was held over to the federal conference. In a
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short, specially convened ATF conference on 17 January 1992 a motion to dissolve the Australian Teachers Federation was carried unanimously. The ATU conference and its conference dinner gave the septuagenarian a rousing send-off, with the final eulogy delivered by the former ATF deputy secretary Bill Leslie. Amid the nostalgia, banter and poetry and the genuine testimonials to the Federation’s place in Australian educational history were personal moments for the new Unionists to reflect on the legacy that the Federation was handing on to its successor.
Union records consulted ATF Action Circulars 1981–889, NBA Z219, Boxes 11–12, 230 ATF Background Notes 1986–89, NBA Z219, Boxes 210–15 ATF Annual Conference Papers and Reports 1988–92, Federation of Education Union Information Centre (FEUIC), South Melbourne ATF Executive Minutes 198–91, Files 2.10.1 to 2.12.8 ATU Executive Minutes 1984–91, Files 1.7.1 to 1.7.9. ATF/ATU Review 1986-89, NBA Z 219, Box 252 Women’s Representation in ATU, NBA 219, Boxes 245–6, 249 & AEU file 1.20.4 TAFETA Papers 1974–82, NBA Z260; 1982–88 NBA, Z 219 Boxes 272–3; TAFE Division AEU File 1.20.7 and: NTTF & ACTTF Amalgamation with ATU, file 1.20.5 SSTUWA, files 3.12.1; 3.12.5 TTF (before 1991), file 3.10.5 Victorian no. 1 branch, file 3.11.3 Victorian no. 2 branch, file 3.11.5 Victorian no. 3 branch (KTAV), files 3.11.12 Victorian branch, Rules Conference 1991, file 1.20.6
3 The Challenges of Modernisation There are occasions in life where what is just good for an individual group of workers may not be the best for the industry or for the nation. You have to try and balance all that. Great democracies survive and great organisations survive when you have got that balance right, when you have the capacity to balance all the different pressures. We are about democratic and accountable organisations. We are about driving power more to the bottom, more to the local level, more to the enterprise level, and more to the union. Bill Kelty, ACTU Secretary, September 1992
Unlike most other trade unions, the Australian Teachers Union had to ‘grow up’ quickly as it faced the dictates of ‘New Times’ in education, politics and workplace relations. It was as if the Union went through a developmental growth from childhood to adulthood (or union maturity) without the advantages of an adolescence (or youth stage) with all the allowances for awkwardness, indecision and folly, and without the opportunities to make mistakes. The 1990s provided the Union with the opportunities to confront the dangers of the times. How the Union responded to the needs for organisational modernisation is the question that frames this chapter.
Industry unionism Industry unionism emerged from the Australian trade union movement’s concerns in the late 1980s about the decline in unionism, 39
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particularly the loss of membership and the low participation in unions by women, young people and immigrant and Aboriginal workers. In addition, the union movement faced the persistence of New Right agendas in Australian politics. Under an imported, indiscriminate rhetoric these agendas advanced ideas on the deregulation of the labour markets and the de-collectivisation of labour relations (Peetz, 1998, pp. 84–113). In 1987 the ACTU Congress raised its battle standard from Australia Reconstructed (1987) and called on the union movement to rejuvenate itself, principally by the reorganisation and rationalisation of union activities, including services to members and their governing structures. The basic argument was that individual unions should ensure that they remained relevant to their members and to the labour movement in general. A key strategy in this action was to create larger but fewer unions on an industry basis as had developed in West Germany and Sweden (Chaison, 1996, pp. 128–34). The 1987 Congress had agreed to accept in principle a strategy of union rationalisation that would create 20 large ‘super’ unions by the early 1990s, each based on defined industry groups. The ACTU would, if required, coordinate and guide each major amalgamation in the industry groups. Two years later the Congress was told that the external problems had worsened but the union movement had hardly responded to the challenge of reorganisation. ‘Education’ was already perceived as an industry group and given its size, its segmentation and the range of services provided by all its members any major rationalisation would be a formidable task. This was the challenge to the ATU and others. In numbers of unions alone about 45 unions were active in the ‘education industry’. Nothing was done until the ACTU’s 1989 Congress introduced a new objective: the strategy of union rationalisation. The ATF 1990 Conference endorsed the ACTU’s objectives and defined for itself that the education industry should cover all workers employed in all education and training programs, from preschools to post-compulsory years. It also envisaged that there should be only one industry and that education should not be fragmented into sectors of employers. This meant that teaching aides and clerical staff would belong to an industry that also included university academics and general staff, TAFE instructors, school teachers and preschool teachers and staff. Of course, some of these workers were already covered by ‘non-teacher unions’. The five federal unions in the teaching areas of education moved quickly to give substance to the ACTU plans. The first priority was the
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formation of one education union covering teaching and general staff, to be operational in two–three years. If such a union could not be formed by then (before, it should be noted, the next federal elections and the likelihood of a change in government) then it wanted two unions in the industry; one for academic and teaching staff, the other for general staff. Failing this, the third option would be separate treatment for higher and other education sectors. Bill Kelty, the ACTU secretary, confided that the ACTU had persuaded the Labor government to change the Industrial Relations Act 1988 (Cwlth) to allow for superunion registrations and extended coverage, with promises that they be a party to ‘industry bargaining units’ along with existing unions (Robson to ATF Affiliates, 2 May 1990, ATF Executive Minutes). The urgency of the situation was not lost on the five unions; a heads of agreement was signed in May and a proposed council of five education unions, provided for in the agreement along the lines suggested by the ACTU to oversee rationalisation in the industry, was also established the same month as the Federation of Education Unions (FEU). The FEU’s first action was defensive; it was to provide a protective barrier against other trade unions that were interested in extending their coverage in the education industry. Indeed the speed in the establishment of such a council had been motivated by a ‘Section 118A’ application in the AIRC by the State Public Services Federation (SPSF) to extend its coverage to clerical workers in NSW universities. Section 118A of the Act allowed the AIRC in the resolution of union ‘demarcation disputes’ to transfer membership coverage from one union to another. (The other roles of the FEU will be considered later.) The demarcation dispute in the higher education sector had important ramifications for the Union. The actual dispute, one of many of this type, forced the ACTU to intervene between the FEU and FMWU. It heard the five education unions’ contention that the industry should be regarded as a whole and that they, because of their size and coverage, should be recognised as the industry group and that other claimants to membership should negotiate the exchange in membership or servicing of them with the recognised union. The ACTU then translated its new policy of ranking unions as ‘principal’ unions, ‘significant’ unions and ‘other’ unions to rule that there were no existent principal unions in higher education, only eight significant ones (ACTU Executive Decisions, Oct 1990, ACTU Papers). The ACTU also decided that the higher education sector would constitute one industry. This produced two consequences for the education unions. First, it meant that the stated objective of establishing one super education
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union was undermined by the broad segmentation between higher education and the other education sectors, therefore there was no urgency to plan for a large amalgamation. Second, the fact that the ACTU had not empowered the university and college academics unions as principal unions drove them to move faster towards achieving their amalgamation along with the three other unions representing other staff in tertiary education. This would give rise to the formation of the NTEU in 1991 (and in the process the Union would eventually transfer its few academic members in NSW and Queensland to the new NTEU). This change in direction had to be retailed to the Union’s membership and was done diplomatically by David Robson, Di Foggo and Tony Lawrence, who was appointed as the Union’s industry (unionism) officer in 1990. Robson raised the issue in the minds of most observant Unionists: if one industry could be established by the ACTU for higher education, why was it necessary for there to be only one broad industry that would cover the rest of the education sectors and especially cover all government and non-government school teachers? (Robson, Australian Teacher, Nov 1990). Few people in the Union were overly concerned about any future amalgamations or extended coverage with unions who represented other workers in state schools or TAFE colleges, or kindergarten teachers, provided that the Union became the principal union and the process of change did not cause undue inter-union conflict, but the question of a possible amalgamation with non-government school teachers was something else. Already in 1990 the NSWTF’s annual conference and the QTU executive had questioned the long-term implications of the unions’ ‘Heads of Agreement’. Both were adamantly opposed to any form of amalgamation between the Union and the ITF; they were even lukewarm about a confederation of teacher unions, preferring the Union to explore amalgamations with other public sector federations before considering amalgamations with any private sector unions. The reason for their hostility was obvious: they were fundamentally opposed to the state aid in education principle, though they had relaxed their public utterances of this prejudice. Certainly by 1990 they were overtly critical of the improvement in funding arrangements for non-government schools introduced by Commonwealth and state Labor governments. Before the 1991 conference Robson wrote of a ‘powerful alliance’ between the Union and the ITF during the national salaries campaign, but the funding controversy in Australian schooling needed to be more settled, and the role of some non-government schools
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operating as elitist institutions had to be resolved ‘before we can even consider the ATU and ITF in any fully amalgamated industrial union’. (Australian Teacher, Nov 1990). To be fair, the ITF was also hesitant about a possible amalgamation. Its leadership acknowledged that the powerful parents’ groups, sections of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy and school employers’ groups were not attracted to the concept of an amalgamated union. There was also a suspicion that some of the public sector’s proposals for amalgamation were a device to ensure either increased public accountability of non-government schools or the eventual demolition of non-government schooling. The ITF’s position was that it looked forward to continued cooperation with other education unions and that the FEU was a valuable opportunity to develop more effective unionism (D. Shearman, One Fed. Ed Union, n.d. AEU file 13.2.1). The ATF’s annual conference in January 1991 deliberated on industry unionism and decided that for the coming year the national bodies should concentrate on the development of education industry unions, covering workers in all but the higher education institutions in both the public and private sectors (Annual Conference 1991, Minutes, p. 3, ATF/AEU Conference Papers) (my emphasis). Later that year the ATU and ITF jointly submitted a paper on the schools sectors to the ACTU executive. Both requested that their unions be given approval to develop a single union to cover most education workers (excluding school cleaners etc.) and that they be designated principal unions by the ACTU for the schools sectors of the education industry (Unions’ Rationalisation, submission, Dec 1991, AEU file 13.2.2). The ACTU agreed at the end of 1991. The ATU also approached the ACTU to clarify the future relationship of the teacher unions with those unions who represented early childhood workers. The following year the Union began to negotiate an ATU/KTAV merger in Victoria. These issues had been discussed in individual unions throughout 1991, but they also acted as a focus for the development of the FEU’s operations. These had never been clearly defined so that the FEU meetings could take on board for discussion and exchange any matters referred to it by one of its constituents. Thus, one of its first meetings (30 September 1990), consisting of women leaders in the FEU groups, was a small forum on the effects of the ACTU rationalisation campaign on women’s participation in unions. Subsequent broader meetings discussed informally (until the establishment of a conference in 1993) the roles of the education unions’ representation on the ACTU executive and its participation in the Left unions’ caucus and the ACTU
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congresses. There were also opportunities for the unions to jointly consider major suggestions for changes in the schools and training agendas, such as the implementation of the Finn and Mayer committees’ recommendations on post-compulsory schooling. By mid-1992, still without a heavy organisational structure, the FEU had agreed to develop its own Trade Union Training Authority (TUTA) courses aimed at the further education of branch leaders and other key activities and this was in anticipation of TUTA devolving its training programs to unions themselves. This would eventually give rise to the AEU’s Centre for Education and Training. The FEU had explored fully the practicalities of a joint building and was close to deciding to buy the present building in Clarendon Street, South Melbourne. Furthermore, the prospect of a new joint building raised the possibility of a common library and/or resources centre to be used by all FEU constituents and members (FEU Minutes, file 13.2.2). The building, which housed the national headquarters of the AEU, ITF and NTEU, and Victorian branches of the latter two unions, commenced operations in November 1993. By early 1995 the role of the FEU in coordinating the inter-union work of the three major federal unions in education had become more problematic as the unions tended to go their own way (McCulloch to Durbridge, 28 April 1995, FEU file 13.2.1). This coincided with a loss of momentum in the ACTU’s overseeing of union rejuvenation and it was left to individual federal unions to explore further rationalisation with kindred organisations. In the education group, the AEU raised with the NTEU their possible amalgamation because of the emerging links between TAFE institutions and universities, and the industry pressures for expanding credit transfers between the two sectors. By the end of 1996 both federal unions had launched a program of joint activities, such as the Post-Compulsory Education Conference, to test whether a common public voice could become the springboard for a planned amalgamation. During 1997 a joint working party was established to explore options. Meanwhile the AEU had not relaxed its efforts to develop industry unionism in the workplace, or between similar workplaces. At the same time it had pushed on with its attempts to effect appropriate mergers in its state bodies. Both types of initiatives were potential minefields for the AEU because they were laden with constraints emanating largely from the trade union movement, as well as from the industrial relations legislation. In June 1992 the ACTU advised all its affiliates involved in the coverage of workers in schools to negotiate
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agreements over changes in coverage by mid-1994. In the meantime the unions who covered non-teaching staff should have first option to recruit in non-unionised areas, but if they decided that it would be more appropriate for the AEU to recruit sections of non-teaching staff, then it should be allowed to do so. The AEU believed that it should target non-teaching staff as well as Aboriginal and Islander Education Workers (AIEWs) nationally. The Union was heartened by the successes of the NTEU amalgamation with general staff in universities and the NSW Independent Education Union’s coverage of school clerical staff and others covered formerly by the Clerks Union. During the 1994 Union Conference a successful workshop on expanding industry unionism at the school and system workplaces was conducted with delegates. No other breakthroughs occurred and the ACTU reminded the state schools organisations that the deadline of July 1994 was still in force, after which time the ACTU would directly intervene. This threat was contested fiercely by the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) and Australian Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union (ALHMWU), who at least agreed to seek further negotiations with the AEU. The Union had precipitated this by seeking a conciliated agreement in the AIRC, an action tacitly supported by the ACTU leadership who favoured the Union having coverage of school workers not already recruited by the other unions (AEU Federal Executive meeting, 31 August–2 Sept 1994). The CPSU, in particular, was opposed to the ACTU’s new position and both the ALHMWU and the CPSU were far from cooperative in the conciliation proceedings. When these unions failed to find agreement, the Union proceeded to ask the AIRC to rule on the union demarcation dispute (‘Section 118A’ application). It contended that it sought exclusive coverage of allied workers and AIEWs in all government schools across Australia because it could best serve the interests of non-teaching staff in schools (excluding cleaners, janitors and ground keepers) and it should be able to design recruitment schemes and draft conditions of membership etc. without interference from other unions. This application (argued between March 1995 and November 1996) became one of the longest and convoluted cases on industry unionism handled by the industrial commission. During proceedings, however, the Union was confronted with two setbacks. First, the AIRC in a separate case refused the NTEU’s coverage of general staff at the Northern Territory University and awarded it to the CPSU on grounds of traditional coverage arguments. Second, the NSW Industrial Commission awarded coverage of allied staff in NSW schools to the Public Service Union,
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but not before the NSWTF had withdrawn from the state case in preference of a national decision. The AIRC’s decision of November 1996 was a partial victory for the AEU. It confirmed the AEU’s coverage in South Australia and decided that the AEU could obtain joint coverage of allied staff in Victoria with the cooperation of the other unions, and could seek the same type of coverage with the same conditions in respect of all other state school systems, except for New South Wales and the ACT. The AIRC decision also gave tacit encouragement for the AEU to continue one of its industrial priorities: the construction of a federal award proposal for Aboriginal and Island education workers (AIRC Print N6795). The Union has not made the same progress in its applications to obtain exclusive coverage of Queensland TAFE teachers. It was encouraged by the QTU and its new TAFE branch-recruiting members against the wishes of the QPOA (now the SPSF branch), but ran into fierce opposition from the SPSF and the Queensland government on issues of jurisdiction. The Union has claimed a ‘first round’ victory in persuading the AIRC to reject the claims that the dispute should be heard by the Queensland commission, the AIRC ruling that it would be a joint hearing, but this has not proceeded to date. The place of early childhood workers in the Union needs to be positioned within the peculiar ‘tribalism’ of Victorian teacher union politics. Within the early childhood sector in Victoria the KTAV had represented kindergarten teachers, play-school leaders and other workers employed by public and private institutions. During 1990 the KTAV decided to join the ATU after considering proposals from the VTU, the ITF and the ATU. It did so because of a perceived threat to its existing conditions of work as regulated in its Victorian award and the attempt by the Federated Miscellaneous Workers Union to bring it into its federal coverage as part of that union’s rationalisation reforms. The KTAV ballot indicated that members wished to join the ATU as an education union, but they also wished to retain their distinctive membership rather than become part of the larger teacher unions group in Victoria. In February 1992 an ATU special conference approved the necessary rule changes, and created the Victorian no. 3 branch as a separate branch for KTAV members. The Union felt that the creation of this special branch, certainly an addition to the multiple branch structure in Victoria, was a useful step in contributing to the Union’s involvement in education industry rationalisation. It was also felt in some quarters that it would more easily facilitate the eventual merger of the Victorian
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branches into the one branch, an expectation that had currency in the federal office since 1989 (ATF/ATU Rules Seminar Report, 2 May 1989, file 3.11.12).
Single branches The Union’s federal office was sympathetic to the notion of multiple branches as a means of reducing teacher union division in situations where union fragmentation prevailed. Victoria, however, was not alone in experiencing union fragmentation. In Tasmania the TTF existed alongside two former ‘breakaways’: the (Senior) Secondary Colleges Staff Association and the Tasmanian Technical (later TAFE) Staff Society. Both had smaller, non-exclusive memberships made up of teachers and ancillary staff. The ATU (Tasmanian branch), the same people who controlled the TTF, was singularly unimpressed with the Union’s suggestion that the secondary colleges group be asked to consider establishing a no. 2 branch of the AEU in Tasmania. Instead it proceeded to exploit the supportive climate of industry unionism to bring the secondary college staff back into the TTF fold. To achieve its aim the Union’s branch in Tasmania hosted a series of discussions on amalgamation with these teachers and others, and reached an agreement in-principle to pursue an amalgamation. They were joined in their discussions soon after by the TAFE Staff Society (which belonged to the TAFE Division, but not the TTF) and whose local president had just been elected the TAFE division’s national president. By July 1992 the federal office in Melbourne was advising the Tasmanian branch to apply for a Department of Industrial Relations financial grant to cover legal expenses to effect a merger (AEU file 3.10.1). The Tasmanian branch was the first state-based organisation to fulfil the dreams of early Union activists that the Union would become a federal union of single state branches, as had occurred in the two territory unions in 1991. Obviously the smaller sized unions could see more clearly the advantages of forming a single organisation. In Tasmania’s case it was also a nice touch because Tasmanian teachers had pioneered the idea of a single union in each public school system in Australia as long ago as 1861. Across Bass Strait the federal officers were delighted with the Tasmanian venture in teacher union reform; it had helped inspire South Australia’s teachers to plan for a conversion from the SAIT into the South Australian branch by 1995. More importantly, the Tasmanian
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effort lent material weight to the Union’s determination to achieve a similar outcome in Victoria. This would be the ultimate challenge to the federal office because Victorian teacher unionists always seemed to dance to a different tune. The Victorian failure to achieve a single federation, at least of the teacher unions in 1990, was acknowledged by both the VSTA and the new FTUV almost immediately and the gate was left open for further discussions on a larger amalgamation at the first annual conference of the FTUV in October 1991. The following year the VSTA’s annual general meeting recognised the need to reopen discussions with the FTUV as a response to the Kennett Coalition Government’s implementation of a new deregulatory industrial relations regime. The VSTA’s council later resolved that the Union should take effective charge of this planning and that it should also preside over discussion between the VSTA, FTUV, the KTAV and the Unions’ branches (VSTA Council Minutes extract, 27 Feb 1993, file 3.11.5). The Union did not wait for a second invitation. Its March meeting of the federal executive established a chain of processes that would produce a new Victorian branch which would replace the three branches and the state teacher unions and allow the KTAV to amalgamate if it so desired. To handle this, and to provide consultation with all the Victorian unions, the AEU formed a Victorian branch committee consisting of two interstate general secretaries, the federal president of TAFE (who was from Tasmania, which was in its final stages of amalgamation), the president of the ACT branch and Robson, the Union’s federal secretary and a former general secretary of a Victorian union (Robson, ‘One ATU Vic Branch: Has its time come?’ 1993). The committee immediately commenced mapping out the areas for amalgamation and the attendant problems of sectoral autonomy, proportional representation of members of sectors, centrally controlled funding, future leadership positions and what might become of those local leaders and officials who did not share in the redistribution of power and offices. Traversing somewhat gingerly the internal politics and personalities of Victorian teacher unionism, the committee was able to work through the first principles of creating a single branch which emphasised that it would be open to all members of Victoria’s early childhood services, the state school system, TAFE Colleges, Adult Migrant Education Services and special education. The VSTA and FTUV would be dissolved by mid-1995 and their assets transferred to the new branch and that the KTAV would continue to operate as an associated body until such time as its members wished to
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dissolve the union and join the new branch. Meanwhile the KTAV agreed that no. 3 branch would also be dissolved by the end of June 1995, thereby creating a single AEU branch. The planning committee was conscious that even from the start of the operation they had to ensure that the AEU was not seen as steamrolling the local efforts to find an amalgamation formula, or not consulting ‘equally’ with the Victorian unions. Unless it achieved this the process could stall, or ‘personality politics’ could appear, just as easily as when one Victorian leader appealed to Robson ‘to put aside your past allegiances [to the TTUV] and consult closely with everyone in the Victorian rainbow’ (Henderson to Robson, 11 March 1993). Later, another VSTA appeal was made to the federal office in these terms. I guess what I am saying is that I feel the AEU is not doing enough to put pressure on the FTUV to compromise ... [it] appears to be of the view that a single AEU Victorian branch really amounts to the FTUV taking over the VSTA and KTAV on terms decided by the FTUV. (Henderson to Robson, 8 April 1994)
Meanwhile the Union had obtained a $25 000 grant from the government’s union rationalisation scheme to obtain legal advice and pay for publicity and a ballot of the teachers and TAFE members of the Victorian unions. The Union also appointed local working parties supervised by its Victorian branch committee to look at specific and unresolved issues: finance and membership, structure and administration, and arrangements for the transition to a single branch. The ballot of FTUV and VSTA members, held in mid-1994, resulted in nearly 10 000 members overwhelmingly (96 per cent) agreeing ‘to support the creation of a single branch’. Twelve months later the two teacher unions were dissolved and the Victorian branch came into operation. As the Union’s media release announced in July 1994: ‘At last we have something for which we can thank the Kennett government’. In October 1994 the KTAV members decided by plebiscite to become part of the Union’s Victorian branch. Some 13 months later the KTAV decided to dissolve itself, after another plebiscite in which about twothirds of the membership voted in favour of dissolution. Henceforth their union and professional activities would be organised exclusively by the Union’s Victorian branch (KTAV/no. 3 branch, file 3.11.12). The KTAV had enjoyed its participation in the federal body; in particular, it had been assisted by the federal officers in securing a federal award for kindergarten teachers (see Chapter 5). In return, the KATV leadership was called on by the federal body to be the AEU’s
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voice on early childhood issues. The difficulty for the Union was that it did not have ‘principal union’ status in the early childhood industry and that industry was seen by most governments as not related to education but to labour market policies, because it allowed mothers to enter the labour force (Federal Conference 1996, ATF/AEU Conference Papers). To counter this public perception, the Union used the Victorian kindergarten members to develop a national working party on early childhood issues, which was elevated to a Union national committee in 1996. This gave the early childhood committee direct access to the federal executive (and the Federal Conference) through the granting of observer status. In turn, the Union expected the national committee to provide ‘the cohesion which will enable the AEU to be substantially more pro-active’ on early childhood education including public recognition of its importance (Federal Conference 1996, ATF/AEU Conference Papers). This was to provide the foundation for the Union’s development of a new and substantial policy statement and action plan for early childhood education. The Victorian unions’ ‘saga’ had not concluded, however, as a new local issue, school principals’ unionism, was to engage the federal union. In Victoria school principals and deputy principals had operated separately as industrial organisations for many years. After the change in government in 1992, the Victorian Principals Federation (VPF) was the only union body consulted by the Minister and senior departmental managers. The VPF had opposed the growth of federal awards for Victorian teachers and did not want their members, who were all employed on individual contracts, to be a party to these awards. Not all members of the principal class in Victoria were members of the VPF but the majority were, and so the model of separate principal unionism was exported to Western Australia in 1995 and there were also moves to extend the model to a national basis. The Union responded to these challenges by establishing a working party to examine the more effective representation of principal class unionists in the AEU (Vic no. 1 branch paper, Federal Executive 7–8 March 1995). This led to the establishment of a national principals committee which, along with a principals caucus, at the federal conference attempted to enhance the role and representation of principals in the Union. The federal conference supported the work of this committee by agreeing to grant ‘observer status’ to the principals group on the federal executive. The branches also cooperated by ensuring the principal class members were part of their federal conference delegations (Alan Taylor to Federal Conference 1997, ATF/AEU Conference Papers).
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In 1997 the VPF, as one of the ‘smaller unions’ now encouraged under the Workplace Relations Act 1996, applied for registration as a federal union. After a lengthy hearing, with the Union intervening as the major objector, the principals union was registered by the AIRC in November 1999 (AIRC Print S0785). This registration is currently suspended pending the resolution of an appeal by the AEU against the decision. What can be made of the Australian Education Union’s contribution to union rationalisation in Australia? The wider question of the process has attracted serious debate among the labour movement and academic observers. The union merger movement in Australia, despite internal objections to particular amalgamations and questions about new organisational effectiveness, did at least demonstrate that the ACTU’s coordination had encouraged ‘the adaptability of unions to new environments’ (Peetz, 1998 p. 194). The Union’s participation in the ACTU project can be best described as a middle-level reform. It would probably have strengthened school and TAFE unionism without the influence of the ACTU, although one can never make any safe predictions on Victoria’s approach to teacher union unity. The ACTU’s plan appeared to provide a positive climate for the inclusion of some preschool teachers, allied staff and AIEWs in the Union. But given the configurations of education funding in Australia, it was always problematic that the Union would amalgamate with ITF. Similarly, a merger between university unions and the Union was always only a remote possibility given the inherent suspicion by academics of school teachers and of a union structure numerically dominated by school teachers. The ACTU leadership does not appear overly disappointed that the education industry did not create the one ‘super’ union for education, because its aim, at least after the event, was to promote union mergers in which particular union groups could respond to their own particular environments. Anything else, that is the ACTU’s insistence on a Union merger with ITF or NTEU, especially the ITF, may well have caused the reverse of the desired effect: serious fragmentation of the Union, a phenomenon that was not unknown to the Union’s predecessors.
Improving the organisation’s effectiveness Union mergers and the growth of industry unionism were only part of the ACTU’s plan to rejuvenate trade unionism in Australia to meet the changes in the contemporary national and global economics. The
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modernisation of the Union had proceeded smoothly in terms of its responses to external pressures for union rationalisation, but the other key element in this process, that of ensuring that the Union became a more effective teacher trade union, was a far more complex challenge. In the 1990s the Union faced two serious and interrelated problems which, if it did not surmount, would reduce its standing in the education and labour communities and diminish its credibility among state education workers. These problems were: declining union membership and the relevance of a federal union to teachers. Decline in membership, that is a decline in teacher union membership in the states and territories, directly determined the size of the AEU, its finances through the capitation fees systems and its capacity to function as a federal union and a national organisation in education. Overall trade union membership had begun to decline in the 1980s (union density of 50 per cent in 1982 fell to 42 per cent in 1990) as a result of substantial changes in the labour force moving from manufacturing to service industries. Hence much of the redirection of the ACTU’s internal campaigns after 1988 was to recapture the labour force’s adherence to union membership (Peetz, 1998, pp. 188–95). Teacher unionism in state education systems remained steady during this period and union density remained high except in Victoria because of its traditional pattern of union fragmentation. After the AEU had rearranged its process for membership recruitment so that school teachers and TAFE joined the AEU directly through their membership of affiliates, the Union’s membership reached a high of 183 000 in June 1990. It then fell to 173 530 in June 1992 and 152 606 in June 1994. The main reason for this startling decline between 1992 and 1995 was the loss of teachers through voluntary retrenchments in Victoria and then South Australia, combined with the non-replacement of teachers in other states when teachers took normal or early retirement. Often where replacements did occur, teachers were employed on a casual, short-term basis and this precarious form of employment in schools and TAFE colleges was unconducive to union recruitment (Federal Secretary’s Report for 1993, p. 7, ATF/AEU Conference Papers). This decline in membership in the early 1990s could not have come at a worse time for the AEU. It was faced with paying for the new office in South Melbourne (it was forced to borrow from the state branches) and also faced an escalation in the legal costs of industrial applications before the AIRC. As many of these applications involved groundbreaking decisions in the education industry they were both
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complicated and lengthy (see Chapter 5). Finally, other demands on the federal office also increased the Union’s operational costs because the new union was establishing itself as a dominant voice in an expanding national education polity. The Union’s immediate response to its crisis in finance was the introduction of program budgeting, which tightened its control over expenditures and thereby reduced its operational deficits. It also insisted on cost-sharing arrangements of legal expenses with branches and bodies directly involved in particular industrial disputes before the AIRC. The AEU also used a levy system on teachers to pay for a legally qualified federal industry officer, but in 1995, after considerable debate, it appointed a legal officer out of its own revenue and this helped to defray the costs of consulting with law firms. As the sharing of information with the branches incurred heavy postal changes, the Union introduced an electronic mail system, again reducing these costs but in the process increasing the informational traffic between the federal office and the branches and associated bodies. Finally, the federal office introduced an external review of its own activities that recommended a small teams approach to work organisation in the following areas: administration; industrial; policy and research; and the TAFE sector (Federal Secretary’s Report for 1994, p. 14, ATF/AEU Conference Papers). By 1996 the Union could report that because of these imposed economies a balanced budget would be achieved that year and most of the repayments of the branch loans on the new building would be discharged (Federal Secretary’s Report for 1995, p. 4, ATF/AEU Conference Papers). To ensure, however, that the federal union became more attractive to basic membership in the states and territories, the Union had to develop new strategies that would gain the support of the branches. These strategies were to be formulated by extensive consultation between the AEU federal office and the branches via regular meetings between the federal secretariat and the branches’ general secretaries. The latter were critical in this process because they were responsible for the delivery of any new strategies, and also were the first port of call for the membership’s responses to new federal initiatives. Before this could become a productive, two-way process, considerable clarification of the relationships between the federal office and the branches had to occur. This was not a simple task because a new federal organisation existed alongside established state unions; unions that had fixed, sometimes intractable, views on the operational culture of a teacher union. Thus in 1993 the general secretaries meeting called for
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a clarification of federal and state functions and roles as a necessary prerequisite to improving federal/state relationships in the teacher union movement. This required a careful mapping of the divide between federal and state responsibilities and a clear understanding of the common and different work of federal and state officers ‘and how they can participate, along with associated expectations and reporting structures’ (Federal Secretary’s Report, 1993, ATF/AEU Conference Papers) with regard to prioritising national work as well as meeting the branches’ work commitments. The general secretaries’ meeting agreed to develop the following: • • • •
A mechanism for the allocation of work from national meetings; A mechanism for allocation of work on specific projects; The use of people for representation; A mechanism for prioritisation of competing demands of national and state/territory work. (Federal Secretary’s Report for 1993, p. 12, ATF/AEU Conference Papers)
This would be an ongoing process, and not without internal discord. Ultimately, however, a largely unwritten framework for federal/state cooperation was reached by the general secretaries meetings and the ongoing liaison between federal and branch officers. Thus most branches came to accept that a commitment to cooperative ‘federalist’ principles was the only way to maintain an effective federal union. As one federal officer described this approach, supportive branches and associated bodies saw ‘the AEU as a source of increasing resources at the state/territory level through pooling the existing resources of all state/territory/national unions and giving the AEU more responsibilities’ (Richard Walsham, paper to Federal Executive, Nov 1994, pp. 1–2, AEU file 1.7.29). In effect this meant that with a small, non-substantial shift in the loci of teacher union power, the federal union could become a genuine partner in the growth of new teacher activism in Australia. Where the AEU held the dominant position in partnerships, for example in national educational issues, then it opted for establishing working partnerships with other national bodies in education, such as the subject associations, by way of regular national forums. The Union employed a similar strategy in creating the National Curriculum/Professional Issues Forum in 1994 as an avenue to involve classroom teachers from across Australia in the debate on national curriculum frameworks. On the more contentious issues of the federal union’s involvement in state-based industrial or political struggles, the Union was still hampered by a refined sense of
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suspicion or even a lack of basic trust between some branches and the federal office. There was a feeling in several branches that the AEU wanted to be ‘too powerful and [was] consuming too many resources’, or that the AEU, was or would become ‘a centralist monster remote from the members’, or that certain federal officers had ‘hidden’ agenda about the future direction of the AEU which ‘are at odds with the views and wishes of some or all Branches and Associated Bodies’ (Richard Walsham, paper to Federal Executive, Nov 1994, pp. 1–2, AEU file 1.7.29). Fortunately these internal problems, associated with different perceptions about the roles of the AEU, did not impede the Union from its task at hand to develop strategic unionism practices to tackle the problems of declining union membership. The strategies that the Union employed were derived from the ACTU’s responses to the general malaise in Australian trade unionism. Therefore, none of the AEU’s new strategies was original or peculiar to teacher unionism here or in other parts of the metropolitan world. All of the strategies of the 1990s discussed below were a refinement of those pursued by the teacher unions over the preceding quarter of a century. The significant difference was that the federal union was now a main player in these developments. Apart from the normal membership drives conducted by the branches for their own potential recruits, and the revamping of a national teacher union journal titled the Australian Educator, which was to be published and issued free to all members four times a year, the major strategies adopted were new approaches to union recruitment and union education and training. In both cases the AEU followed the lead of the ACTU. The ACTU, under its ‘Organising Works’ program, had agreed to support major unions employing trainee organisers. This particular scheme hoped to enhance local membership recruitment schemes and provide young ‘ACTU’ trainees with opportunities to develop their union organisational experience and skills in actual industrial situations. The AEU employed several of these trainees in some of its state branches; indeed one of the first trainees worked in the TAFE sector in Victoria (Federal Secretary’s Report to Executive, 2 Sept 1994, AEU file 1.7.28). The trainee scheme opened up discussion within the AEU on the more effective use of local organisers in both membership recruitment and retention strategies. In August 1996 the AEU, with funding assistance from the ACTU training scheme, convened in Canberra the first
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national training workshop for teacher union organisers. One objective of the workshop was to involve organisers in the Union’s main debates on industrial and educational issues so that they would be better equipped to ‘sell’ these issues to rank and file members in local regions. The other main objective was to develop an interchange between AEU leaders in the federal and state officer and local organisers on the ways to implement ‘best practice’ in organising work among school teachers, TAFE instructors and other education workers. The outcomes of this exercise were deemed to be successful and the AEU learnt from the organisers that teacher unions should not attempt ‘to try to do too many things at once’ with organisers or rank and file members. There was also general agreement that there should be more AEU organisers’ conferences (Federal Secretary’s Report for 1996, p. 6, ATF/AEU Conference Papers). In 1994 the Union established the AEU Centre for Education and Training Futures to coordinate the teacher unions’ union training scheme. Previously the state unions had been directly involved in union education under the independent Trade Union Training Authority (TUTA). During the late 1980s TUTA surrendered its independence to the ACTU and Labor government in order to mould TUTA programs and methodology into their ‘neo corporatist Accord strategy’ (Voll, 1997, p. 85). This ensured that the Coalition parties perceived TUTA as a key target in its overall plans to deregulate the labour market and de-emphasise the dominant role of the trade union movement in industrial relations. As a precautionary measure during the 1993 general election, the ACTU indicated that it was prepared to manage trade union training if TUTA was abolished by a conservative government. Although TUTA was spared by the surprise re-election of Labor in 1993, the ACTU pressed on with its idea of creating its Union Training Scheme. The AEU, in conjunction with the other constituents of the FEU, decided to establish a national training centre for the education industry under the UTS and, like the ACTU blueprint, concentrate their training efforts on the union education of workplace delegates. Financial grants from the ACTU would be used to employ trainers in the states. However, due to internal differences within the FEU, the AEU went it alone and established the AEU Centre for Education and Training Futures. It was to use its own funds and, by agreement, grants from the ACTU to help develop new training programs in its branches, especially in areas like enterprise bargaining, and at the same time develop public seminars and publications on the place of public education in contemporary Australia. To implement
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this it created a national coordinator and management body. Finally, the AEU hoped to organise a series of programs on a fee-for-service basis on professional issues affecting teachers and TAFE instructors in such area as national curriculum frameworks, literacy intervention strategies and vocational training issues. This was the most ambitious part of the training program because these were the domains of teachers’ subject associations and other professional bodies. Ultimately, the AEU’s challenge to this area of professional development failed to materialise because of the reluctance of employers to allow teachers time to attend what were seen in many quarters as ‘union activities’ (FEU Executive meeting, 25 Feb 1994, file 13.2.2; Federal Secretary’s Report for 1994, pp. 4–5, ATF/AEU Conference Papers). Subsequently the AEU played an important coordinative role in teacher union training after 1994. In the branches and associated bodies a substantial expansion of training occurred in workplace labour relations, using both the union’s existing union educators and several new trainers who had previously worked for or with TUTA. This allowed local activists the opportunity to hone their skills in workplace politics, including participation in state-wide enterprise bargaining, as well as engaging, with others, in such areas as cross-cultural awareness programs or Aboriginal reconciliation programs. The problem for rank and file participation in traditional and new union programs was that classroom teachers in schools and TAFE faced ever-increasing demands on their time and energies as professionals just to satisfy their basic employment requirements. As part of its strategy to make the AEU more attractive to teachers and others, the federal union also entered the field of ‘non-industrial’ services. State teacher unions had helped pioneer the field of offering consumer-type benefits in the fields of health insurance, holiday travel, retail-discounting and legal and financial advice. Facing problems of union membership decline, the Union, like other Australian trade unions, felt that the introduction or expansion of these types of services, the secondary functions of traditional unionism, could either assist in recruiting new members to the branches or in retaining existing members. Research shows that health and financial security services offered by unions appeal to white-collar workers on relatively low salaries in Australia (Griffin, Svensen, & Teichner, 1997, p. 39), particularly new teachers and those on continuing contract employment, rather than those in permanent positions. Departing from its more conventional role as a federal union and entering the field of nonindustrial services, however, presented the AEU with philosophical
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and practical dilemmas. The former comprises two elements. First, that the increased use of non-industrial services would be an impost on the Union’s scarce resources which could be better employed to ensure that the union obtained improved industrial benefits for members, thereby maintaining the support of existing members. Second, too much emphasis on non-industrial services could effect disenchantment with activist teacher unionists who still saw their union’s main purposes as maintaining, indeed intensifying, the industrial and political struggles with governments and bureaucracy. As a study of British trade unions’ non-industrial services concludes, ‘policy questions for unions would thus appear to be how to adapt collective organisation to meet new circumstances rather than how to replace it with passive consumerism’ (Kelly & Waddington, 1995, p. 420). This philosophical tension between the basic purposes of a union and these new functions was exposed in the AEU during a debate at the 1996 Federal Conference on a Union national superannuation scheme. Although the conference supported in principle the establishment of a national membership services initiative, it only carried the resolution after approving the following amendment: THAT the core service unions should & need to provide the protection and advancement of their members salaries and working conditions. The Australian Education Union and its associated bodies also have the added responsibility of protecting the primacy of the Public Education System in Australia’s long term economic future. However, Education Unions have a long history of providing a broad range of associated services that enhance the provision of ‘core services’ to members. The development of any new membership services at a national level needs to be complementary to both core services and present associated membership services offered by AEU branches and Associated bodies. (Report of Federal Conference 1996, pp. 39–41, ATF/AEU Conference Papers)
The amendment also exposed the practical dilemma for the federal union: any proposed moves into non-industrial services would have to be done with the blessing of the states’ unions. After all, this was not only their patch, but also it would be their members who would be offered a new menu of consumer services. The Union canvassed its general secretaries meetings between 1992 and 1994 to explore the question of non-industrial services. These meetings eventually constructed a portfolio of membership services that were available or should be available to teachers. The obvious
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areas where the AEU could assume a national role were a national discount system, industry superannuation and personal insurance. At the same time, in 1994, the general secretaries were able to ask for federal union support for Queensland and New South Wales where the Teachers Health Funds were to be opened to all comers by the federal government. The AEU provided a national delegation, along with several other federal unions, who persuaded the Health Minister not to proceed with her proposal (Federal Secretary’s Report for 1994, p. 13, ATF/AEU Conference Papers). A national discount system where products were to be negotiated nationally, but ‘badged’ as state union benefits, similar to the system the Union’s general secretary had observed in New York during 1995, had some potential. EDUSAVE, as the national scheme was known, established a scheme for telephone discounts for teachers and others after an agreement was reached between a reseller and the three federal education unions. It was introduced in 1995 and initially attracted some 3000 accounts but it failed to expand because of the concurrent growth in direct discounting by Telstra and Optus. A similar fate awaited the Union’s attempt to negotiate a national sales scheme for teachers’ personal indemnity insurance. The Union also seriously considered promoting its own teacher employment agency, ‘EdEmploy’, which would help find employment (and offer award employment conditions) for casual (relief) teachers. The NSWTF had operated such a scheme for some years, and the AEU had been impressed with similar schemes that were operated by state unions in the USA. In both cases the positive advantage to membership recruitment was that teacher applicants had to be union members. The main difficulty facing most teacher unions in Australia was that state education departments, their schools or TAFE colleges used their own internal recruiting mechanisms, or relied on the Commonwealth Employment Service (Membership Services Report to Federal Conference 1996). If teacher hiring was out-sourced or privatised in the future, as was expected, then the AEU would be operating in a competitive environment but with a relatively small labour market. As the costs of operating such a scheme appeared to outweigh the benefits, the EdEmploy idea fell from favour in the Union. The one remaining area of non-industrial service available to the Union was a teachers’ superannuation scheme. Since 1992 the Union had been exploring the possibility of industry superannuation, a National Education Industry Superannuation Scheme, which could be available to teachers and others in education institutions who could
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not join existing schemes or who wished to transfer to a union-managed scheme (AEU Federal Executive Minutes, 16–17 June 1993). This failed to materialise as an education scheme because contract university staff could join their own national scheme. In 1995 the AEU examined various options and formed its own Industry Superannuation Fund for the states that had no legislative barriers against teachers joining their own funds. The 1996 Federal Conference supported the proposal which would be administered by an outside finance body who had successfully tendered to become the fund administrator. A board of eight trustees was also agreed to; the board to consist of four AEU nominations and four employer representatives. The fund, the conference insisted, should initially seek to enrol new teachers and contract, casual and part-time staff, most of whom were denied access to ‘state’ superannuation benefits. It should also provide benefits and services superior to the funds managed by state governments (Federal Conference Papers, 1996, item 21). ‘EdSuper’ was introduced in 1996 as a regulated superannuation fund and New South Wales was targeted because it allowed a choice for teachers to leave the state system. Moreover, casual teachers would be recruited to the new scheme by the NSWTF. The scheme had only limited success in its first year of operation, but after the NSW school and TAFE payroll systems had been modified to enable superannuation payments to be made to EdSuper, the scheme attracted several hundred teachers. Victoria, the only other state that permitted choice of superannuation fund, provided two challenges for the fund. The state scheme offered the highest level of insurance cover therefore EdSuper had to offer teachers a more attractive scheme. Moreover, unlike NSW, Victoria required the agreement of the state employer before teachers could transfer out of the state scheme. This did not occur until 1 July 1998 so that union recruitment to the scheme focused initially on TAFE colleges. In 1998 the Commonwealth government legislated to provide choice for all its employees, and while state and territory public employees are not covered by Commonwealth legislation, EdSuper is hopeful that the Commonwealth’s example will encourage the states and territories to follow suit. Although the Union is concerned that its scheme has not developed into a large managed fund, it remains convinced that the existence of EdSuper has placed competitive pressures on the large state government schemes to improve their levels of entitlements, choice and insurance options to members, the majority of whom are school teachers (EdSuper Reports to Federal Conference 1997–99, AEU Conference Papers).
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The Union tended to react to these modernisation issues, the principal source of reaction coming from the ACTU’s own approach to strategic unionism during the uncertainties of the 1990s. Initially there was no internal soul-searching by the Union as to what were its essential purposes and functions as a public education trade union. However, by mid-1994 when it became obvious the Union’s new strategies could not stem the decline in members and that it could not effectively maintain its provision of industrial services in a changing education labour market, there were internal calls for a review of the Union (Federal Executive Papers, June 1994, item 31, file 1.7.28). Following a serious debate on whether the Union could afford to or needed to expand its own federal industrial team, the federal officers, led by deputy-general secretary Richard Walsham, called for a strategic planning review of the Union. As Walsham stated in a background paper in November 1994: ‘...we have been dragged along by events and have not always been in the best position to develop our own agendas and perspectives’. The Union must satisfy itself, he said, that it is capable of being both efficient in its performance and effective in its public behaviour. Walsham’s description of effectiveness was that the Union must be seen to do the right things. The federal officers hoped that they and the federal executive, possibly with an outside facilitator, would sit down and discuss the future directions of federal organisation (Walsham paper n.d., in Federal Executive Papers, 2–3 Nov 1994, item 9.4, AEU file 1.7.29). In June 1995 the Union conducted a ‘strategic planning day’ at which the current and future functions and roles of the Union were thrashed out by the officers and federal executive. At the end of the session an interstate working party was formed to codify the day’s concerns and suggest remedies that could be acted upon. Among these concerns was the acceptance that ‘each layer’ of the Union (federal, state, local groupings and work sites) should be clearly defined so that Union decisions would be ‘grounded’ and ‘owned’. The working party’s convenor, Pat Simpson (NSWTF), suggested that: The centre’s role in such a structure is to coordinate, develop broad policy, play a significant role in representing the collective, democratically arrived at view of the organisation and to present them to the national government, as well as provide industrial and research coordinated support for those branches who need it. This role may evolve over time as more associated bodies decide to become fully-fledged branches. (Working Party on Making & Implementing Decisions, 2 June 1995, AEU Federal Executive Minutes)
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As regards concerns about the performance of the Union’s federal governing bodies, the working party proposed a streamlining of procedures and practices at its conference and executive meetings. At the latter, it was expected that if teleconferences were to become an important vehicle for meetings then the meetings had to be even more highly structured with more discipline to be displayed by both executive members and the chairperson. These types of recommendations were incorporated into the working arrangements of the conference and executive. The strategic planning session also decided on the need to strengthen the cross-sectoral links with its TAFE division. To this end, the TAFE divisional leadership in the Union conducted its own review and placed its ideas before a pre-conference seminar of TAFE delegates called ‘AEU in Partnership: strengthening TAFE’. The division called for practical ways of cross-sectoral cooperation, but not integration, between the AEU’s federal office and governing bodies and the TAFE leadership. This cooperation, this common purpose was deemed to be imperative because the TAFE industry, although state-based, was to be increasingly funded and directed as a national training system. The Union, it argued, needed to be positioned to act as a dominant player in the new training reform agenda (Federal Conference Papers 1997, item 20, ATF/AEU Conference Papers). The strategic planning day had closed with the formulation of a medium-term general goal, a so-called vision statement, which would indicate what the Union expected to achieve. This goal was adopted by the 1996 Federal Conference and expressed in the following: The AEU will develop by the year 2000 an effective education industry union which: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
raises the status of workers in the industry; meets the personal and collective needs of the membership; promotes an equitable and quality public education system; is part of the world-wide education community; is committed to national reconciliation with Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islanders; and 6. promotes socially responsible values in education and the wider community.
This broad goal, a set of targeted expectations, was much too general a statement to produce any reorganisation of structures or changes in methods of action. It required a calibration of these ideas into a set of objectives that the Union could work towards. Throughout 1996 the
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federal officers and federal executive teased out the finer points to produce a more explicit set of strategies to meet the vision statement’s goal. The planning documents were given the title, ‘Organising to Advance Public Education – a Four Year Strategy’. This title was to act as an umbrella to the critical issues confronting the Union, educational workers and public education. The strategies to improve the Union’s industrial and political roles will be examined in later chapters. These included new strategies to improve the AEU’s industrial and political performances and a new strategy that aimed to strengthen the internal organisation of the AEU and its branches and associated bodies. The section on union organisation is considered here. The discussion paper emphasised integrated industrial campaigns involving workplace activism, adequate trade union training, new recruiting strategies to attract teachers and others in precarious employment and, importantly, improvements in information technology, including the use of Internet between the federal office, the branches and the rank and file members. The discussion also endorsed the idea of giving increased attention to the work of union organisers, and formalised not only an annual national meeting but also a union officer exchange scheme in the Union and the introduction of briefing materials such as industrial intelligence and digests to be issued by the AEU’s federal industrial team. Finally, the discussion paper raised the issue of the possibility of establishing a second federal office in Sydney with additional officers to meet the federal work demands of its two largest associated bodies, the NSWTF and QTU (Discussion paper, Jan 1997, pp. 4–6, Federal Conference Papers). It was not the intention of this paper that the entire contents and recommendations be debated at the 1997 Federal Conference; clearly issues like briefings, a second office, organisers’ exchanges were matters best dealt with by the federal executive on an ongoing basis between 1997 and 1999. The 1997 Federal Conference, meeting under the theme ‘Organising to Advance Quality Public Education’, approved the broad scheme for a four-year action strategy and asked that the branches and associated bodies should recommend ratification and implementation at their own annual general meetings. In terms of ‘Union Organisation’, the federal conference called for the local acceptance of:: • • • • •
Coordination of campaigning; Coordination of research/information base; Expansion of the use of technology; Development of recruitment strategies and campaigns;’ Provision of Trade Union training and membership education;
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So far the reporting back process from the branches at three successive federal conferences has not revealed any overwhelming local attention to strengthening the AEU as a national organisation, or in the states and territories. For its part, the AEU federal office has established an AEU web page, issued a national industrial bulletin, and taken measures to assist in the development of teacher union organisers. During 1998, the Union’s federal executive, women’s conference and the federal officers devoted considerable time to a proposal for redefining the objectives, roles and responsibilities of the constituent parts of the Union and developing action plans to take the organisation into the new century. Among its new priorities ‘union organisation’ – recruitment retention and membership activism – was given a central place in the federal conference workshops, as well as in the keynote address to the 1999 conference. The streamlining of the future work of the Union at the federal level into three main functions, national executive responsibilities, national coordination of local activities, and national office support for the work of branches and associated bodies, was recognition both of the gradual transfer of power to the national body and the adoption of ‘cooperative federalism’ as a means of strengthening the future of teacher unionism in Australia. The insistence on a clearer division of labour was also seen as a means of achieving internal efficiencies so that duplication and wasted effort could be avoided. This approach was also adopted in the budget strategy where, in 1998 and beyond, considerable financial savings were made by reducing the number of national meetings, including that of the federal executive, thereby reducing the costs of air travel. These savings will allow the Union to allocate funds to ‘AEU Priority Projects’ to be decided on each year by the executive after considering project submissions from the Union’s constituents (Action Plan Workshops & AEU Principles for Future Direction, Federal Conference 1999, ATF/AEU Conference Papers).
Problems in the west None of these initiatives which helped modernise the Union could displace one of the endemic problems of federal unionism in Australia: the impact of internal division within a branch over the Union’s capac-
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ity and effectiveness to deliver for all its members. Often differences arise from the natural division of loyalties between the branch and the federal body; at other times differences arise from the lack of a shared ideology, expectations or experiences in the organisation and this incompatibility is played out through a branch’s behaviour or, in the case of the AEU as well, in the behaviour of its associated bodies, the NSWTF, the QTU and the SSTUWA. This can easily lead to deep-seated tensions and overt conflict between the federal office and the local group and so challenge the authority of the federal union to represent all its members in a ‘federalist’ sense of cooperative action. The issue may be differences over strategies, ideology or personalities (including those of the federal officers) or a combination of these differences. Such differences generally have remained largely away from rank and file members and the public view, but this is not the case in Western Australia. There, the move to establish a federal union presence has been thwarted by local, intramural conflict that has been at times bitter and certainly disruptive to union organisation and practice. The federal office’s attempt to build a solid branch structure in Western Australia had not been resolved and appeared to be hostile to the Union’s growth in Western Australia. It seemed bent on punishing the SSTUWA leadership by ignoring all plans for a more defined branch development. For its part, the AEU’s federal bodies attempted to stay clear of teacher politics in the west, but they could not continue to ignore the fact that the branch was challenging its authority as well as helping to undermine the quality of teacher unionism in the state. Nor could it stand by when a parochial Perth press eagerly quoted the branch president’s statement: ‘…we believe career unionists from the eastern states should not be interfering with the needs and interests of WA teachers and students’ (Sunday Times, 11 April 1993). The ‘two unions’ situation generated serious ramifications for the AEU, as well as increasing the cost, time and energy that the federal office had to devote to a local power struggle. Thus the objections to the SSTUWA’s general secretary’s membership of the Union (which resulted in him being declared a non-member by the State Industrial Commission in 1992) raised obvious problems for the AEU when he wanted also to remain active in the AEU branch and its federal bodies. Similarly, the federal conference’s calls for branch donations to fight the 1993 federal election went largely unheeded in Western Australia. As the press noted, the small Tasmania branch donated $40 000, while the Western Australia branch, which was expected to donate at least another $42 000, subscribed only $14 000 (West Australian, 13 April 1993).
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The Union had to ignore these effects of the division in unionism, but it could not afford to allow the branch to neglect its duties to maintain a membership register and pay capitation fees (and levies) to the federal union, for this was contrary to its own rules and the legal requirements of the Industrial Relations Act. After negotiations collapsed between the SSTUWA and the Western Australian branch, and then collapsed again between the federal officers and the branch, with the consent of the SSTUWA the federal union approached the Federal Court (using Section 259 of Industrial Relations Act) to bring the branch into line. It hoped that the branch would come to see that it must conform to the Union’s rules. The preliminary hearings did force the branch to enter into negotiations with the federal office. This led to a written agreement (signed in April 1993) that provided for a set of mechanisms for the branch to operate as required by the Act and a commitment to alter the branch rules and elections which would allow the same people who were elected to office in SSTUWA to become the officers of the branch. Finally, the branch was to honour its earlier arrangement with the SSTUWA to use its ‘fee for service’ facility to recruit members and collect their subscriptions to the branch. Having reached this agreement, the Union withdrew its application for court intervention into the branch’s affairs. For a month or two the Western Australian situation appeared settled. Its branch officers worked closely with a federal officer (Richard Walsham) to draw up a new set of branch rules that were adopted by a branch meeting towards the end of June. These were forwarded to the Federal Industrial Registry for its approval. During this process, however, a former branch president (acting on behalf of several other branch members who had adopted the rules) objected to the eligibility of membership and officer provisions. She claimed that the SSTUWA’s general secretary, who was an appointed officer and therefore deemed not to be a member of the SSTUWA by the WA Industrial Commission, was ineligible to become a member of the AEU. The AEU had helped write the rules so that this would not be the case and even though it insisted that these were not grounds for ‘ineligibility’, the industrial registrar was unwilling to approve the new branch rules. The federal executive, believing that the branch or sections of it had ‘set up’ the AEU, requested that it remove this ‘contrived’ obstruction from the application papers and warned that if the branch did not do so the agreement between the AEU and the branch would be repudiated. The branch refused to withdraw the objection and the agreement was subsequently repudiated.
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Following further threats of legal intervention, the Union spent the next six months constructing a new agreement for a working relationship with the branch and between the branch and the SSTUWA. Branch elections that were postponed until the end of 1994 produced a group of branch officers and federal conference delegates who were more in line with the leadership of SSTUWA. But it was still not a satisfactory outcome for either the federal union or teacher unionism in Western Australia. The inherent weaknesses in local organisation had not been effectively met by the Union in mid-1995 when the Western Australian teachers were forced to consider both industrial action and a transfer to the federal system to protect their award conditions and their union representation from the Court government (see Chapter 5). The Union came to the side of its fractious branch by advising it of the means to escape the new Western Australian industrial legislation and by establishing an ‘AEU Solidarity Bond’ among all its other branches and bodies to help offset the financial costs of local stop-work actions. When concerns were raised that the SSTUWA might face deregistration from its local industrial relations system and that it may have its assets taken over by the state, the Union proposed that the SSTUWA and its own branch might merge into a new AEU branch (Holding Redlich to AEU, 24 Nov 1995, SSTUWA file 3.12.3). Nothing eventuated at this time but in the aftermath of the 1995–96 disputes the AEU believed that Western Australian teachers may have learnt from the industrial war with the government and so would demand discussions on union amalgamation. Other than a few rumblings, however, again nothing constructive materialised. Rather, another round of teacher union elections in 1997 resulted in the Western Australian branch not sending a full delegation to the 1998 or 1999 Federal Conferences. The Western Australian experience reveals that however systematic the Union’s approach to internal reform and modernisation is, the dangers of local factionalism are never far away and they create the very real possibility of a fragile national organisation that cannot claim with any certainty that it will continue to represent all of Australia’s state-employed teachers.
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Union records consulted ACTU Reports & Papers 1988 – FEUIC ATF/AEU Conference Papers (including Fed. Secretary’s Reports) and Reports 1990 – FEUIC AEU Federal Executive Minutes and Papers, AEU file 1.7.10–1.7.31 Education Industry Rationalisation, AEU file 13.1.2 ACTU Committees/Working Parties Correspondence, file 11.46.1 AEU Centre for Education & Training Futures, file 1.42.1 FEU correspondence, file 13.2.1 FEU meetings and Minutes, file 13.2.2 Tasmanian branch, file 3.10.1 KTAV/no. 3 branch, file 3.11.12 Victorian Amalgamation, AEU file 3.11.5 VPF, files 31.10.13; 31.10.16 WA branch/SSTUWA, AEU files 3.12.1–3.12.5
4 Modernisation: Women Teachers and Indigenous Members As AEU Conference delegates WE commit the AEU to continue the political struggle for justice for Indigenous Australians by walking sideby-side in a partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. We resolve to work towards reconciliation and building better relationships so that we can constitute a united Australia, respecting the land, valuing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage and providing justice and equity for all. Federal Conference Pledge, 1998
One of the Union’s most impressive responses to union modernisation has been the way it has facilitated the fuller involvement of women and indigenous education workers in its governance and activism. In doing so the AEU has adapted the ACTU ‘strategic unionism’ action plans to its particular needs, though it is also fair to claim that the AEU has helped shape the ACTU’s thinking on women and indigenous trade unionists. Early in the Union’s life both groups were marginalised in teacher unionism, but after women teachers gained specific access to the Union’s governing bodies (as seen in Chapter 2) they used this power to become a dominant influence on AEU policy formation. The AEU women also substantially assisted the Union’s recent enfranchisement of ATSI education workers in the federal union. Both these responses to union modernisation have clearly enhanced the
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reputation of the Australian teacher unions in the contemporary labour movement (Spaull, 1998). These changes and their outcomes will be considered separately below.
Women in the Federal Union Having established themselves firmly in both the governing bodies and operations of the Union in the late 1980s, women education workers have played a critical role in federal teacher unionism in the 1990s. Women’s participation has been at two levels. First, they continued to take responsibility for particular Union policies relating to women’s work and career advancement, girls’ education and Aboriginal and early childhood policies, as they had done before. Second, women activists entered the mainstream of Union policy making by virtue of their level of representation in the federal office and, more importantly, in their depth of involvement in the federal executive and federal conferences, where they had the slight majority of representatives. On this account alone, women education workers made their mark; it was made even more strongly by the quality of women’s leadership in the state branches, which impacted directly on federal activities, and the fact that through the women’s formal and informal caucuses the need to maintain gender politics in the Union was constantly reaffirmed. This was critical because of the tendency towards complacency that settled on the Union when both men and women activists believed that many of the battles over gender equity issues had been won by women by the early 1990s. Eternal ‘vigilance’ was the ‘banner’ of the women’s caucus. This type of appeal was both necessary within the operations of the Union and essential as a defensive measure against the backlash over gender reform policies and practices which arose from the economic rationalist models pursued by both governmental and employer leaders. Finally, Union women were not as cohesive as a sectional group as they were in the 1980s largely because of the rise of divergent feminist thought and action in the 1990s, known popularly as the ‘new feminism’. True, the earlier women’s movement in Australian teacher unionism was not as monolithic as it may have appeared in public forums. There were always fissures and tensions internally which stemmed from a mixture of causes: personality differences between individual leaders; left and right political tensions; differences based on interstate rivalries and differences between ‘state righters’ and federalists. But in general these differences were sub-
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sumed by a sense of common purpose: to increase women’s representation in the teacher unions; to increase women’s leadership in union governance and operations; and to enhance the equity claims of women education workers in both the unions’ policies and in the school and TAFE systems. Women teachers were a clear example of a seemingly united ‘second wave’ women’s movement in Australia. Ten years later Union women have been forced to address the new challenge of ‘new’ or ‘popular feminism’ within their own ranks (Bulbeck, 1997). Today’s younger women teachers, like their sisters in other educated white-collar occupations, do not have the group commitment to institutionalised feminism which older women activists displayed in the 1970s and 1980s. They accept as a norm the collective struggles that these women endured to achieve elements of gender reform in trade unionism, employment practices and school organisation and curriculum, but they cannot see the relevance of continuing the struggle in this manner. The challenge for the Union’s women’s movement is how to absorb these new feminisms into its union thinking and make the teacher union movement attractive and relevant to a new generation of women teachers. In the meantime the women’s groups in the Union and its branches absorbed the main challenges that befell the Union’s efforts to modernise its organisation and behaviour. Thus the federal body responded positively to the ACTU’s plan for industry unionism, which had among its aims, ‘the women’s amalgamation charter’ as a strategy to increase women’s effective participation in the union movement and individual unions (Report from Women’s Officer, 1990, AEU file 1.9.1). Similarly, the Union’s women’s meetings were quick to challenge the move towards devolution of school and TAFE systems by pointing out that such processes placed additional burdens on women in discharging their classroom duties, especially those with primary family responsibilities. It also was a further barrier to women’s career advancement, because many had interrupted careers and most had not been given managerial training. The Union’s women raised similar objections to the moves towards enterprise bargaining in the school systems. They argued that enterprise bargaining did nothing to advance gender equity for teachers in the workplace and indeed would re-impose serious disadvantages for women teachers. Their arguments, although having no influence on the industrial processes introduced into education systems, did at least form part of the Union’s philosophical opposition to enterprise bargaining in public
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schooling (Industrial Report to Federal Conference 1995, Federal Conference Papers, pp. 3–4). In other areas of public policy the Union’s women were able to provide a forceful advocacy for particular gender equity issues into the Union’s representation on policy changes. Thus in the emergence of the post-compulsory school debate, the Women’s Conference quickly identified that girls were a major group at risk in transition programs. Special attention had to be devoted to those who did not complete secondary schooling and those moving into areas of vocational training where the work culture and practices had a non-supportive environment for women and girls training (Federal Conference 1993, Papers). Unfortunately, the AEU’s responses in this area were ignored by seminal surveys like Australia’s youth: reality and risk (1998). The women’s meetings used the International Year of the Family (1994) to focus the Union’s attention on education workers with family responsibilities. Their discussions and recommendations emphasised that adjustments should be made in the workplace and in trade union structures to accommodate the flexibility required of workers with immediate family responsibilities. This exercise was useful in the Union’s reaction to the ministerial education council’s inquiry into gender equity in Australian schools, National Action Plan for the Education of Girls 1993–97, published in 1993. The plan argued for a thorough discussion on the construction of gender in schools and the introduction of key strategies for eliminating sex-based harassment in schools and education systems (Women’s Officers’ meeting, 15–16 April 1993, AEU file 1.9.1). In 1994 the ministerial council established an inquiry into ways to promote gender equity in schooling. The AEU was not represented on the taskforce, an indication of the new conservative political reaction to teachers’ representational rights in education. Nevertheless, the Union, through the Women’s Conference, formulated a major policy statement that encapsulated women teachers’ concern for the state of gender reform issues in education. In mapping out this policy the women’s groups had to engage the new thinking about the construction of gender and the accompanying public concern about the decline in boys’ educational opportunities and achievements, as well as the increase in sex-based harassment in schools. As the women’s group admitted to the 1997 conference this was part of the larger struggle to restore principles of equity and social justice in public policy. These terms, they claimed …are passing from the lexicon of governments ... Society is becoming more inequitable, and schools are being reframed in a way which tends
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to reinforce rather than remedy this. In addition the term ‘re-gendering’ is emerging to describe the retreat from gains made on gender issues, and racism and intolerance is receiving more attention in the media than previously, and remains a serious issue in schools. (AEU Federal Conference 1997, Papers)
The basic objective of the policy was to promote gender equity in education settings to bring about ‘a safe and challenging learning environment for all students’. To achieve this, the Union argued, required strategies that would establish a permanent culture of equity in schools and other educational institutions. Such a cultural change could be effected by improving the awareness and knowledge of equity issues in pre-service training, professional development of teachers and school management. The latter was seen as essential so that gender inclusive organisational and management practices could be maintained in systems and schools. The Union’s women, who had enjoyed access to the Labor government’s Status of Women office, found this access almost denied to them after the election of the Howard Coalition Government. This change only served to heighten the Union’s involvement in the ACTU women’s committee. The committee, faced with an overload of issues affecting working women within a conservative labour market environment, formed a number of working parties to carry out specific investigations. AEU representatives served on the working party on precarious employment. This was a valuable experience because the growth of precarious employment in teaching had been examined by the women’s conference in 1996 and because the work for the ACTU helped shape the Union’s formulation of a specific policy in education (AEU Women’s Officers’ Minutes, 26–27 February 1997, p. 6). The Union’s women took a leading role in preparing sections of a new policy, ‘Status of Education Workers’. A central feature of this text, endorsed by the Union’s conference in 1998, was the section on precarious employment, a term which covers all workers who do not have security of employment, the majority of these people in education being women teachers. The Union’s policy is to use the industrial and political systems to introduce controls over the level and incidence of precarious employment, regulate conditions of employment, including engagement, and encourage such employees to become active unionists. The discussion on precarious employment was part of the AEU’s submission to the Senate’s inquiry into the Status of Teachers (May 1997). The women’s officers’ meetings had urged that the preparation
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of this document should be carefully worded so that the feminisation of school teaching should not be regarded as a negative factor in determining the status and role of teachers (AEU Women’s Officers’ Minutes, p. 17). The end result was that the ‘Gender and Status’ section of the submission carried a strong rebuttal of the argument that feminisation contributes to the lowering of teacher status: This labelling is unacceptable because it devalues the work of highly skilled women professionals and because it offers a simple and inadequate solution to the complex problems facing teaching as a profession, the difficulties experienced by boys and girls in schooling and indeed to the question of gender relationships within today’s society. (AEU Women’s Officers’ Minutes, p. 52)
It then explained that women teachers, despite the value of their work, continued to be disadvantaged in career opportunities and were also subjected to the worst features of precarious employment practices. It also incorporated the Union’s gender reform policies in the text, claiming that the simplistic solution of employing more men teachers, particularly to redress the ‘problems of boys’ education’, would merely distort a proper understanding of gender construction, which was necessary if schools were to create equitable educational experiences for girls and boys. Significantly the Senate’s report supported the AEU arguments (and others), stating that ‘the professional should be attempting to attract the best and most suitable people in the profession, regardless of gender’ (Senate, A Class Act, 1998 p. 123). Given the Union women’s high level of activities associated with achieving equitable solutions in education systems, and the difficulties and pressures involved, as well as the impact of new feminism on internal debates, it is not surprising that the Union’s women’s committee (the federal and state women’s officers’ meeting) was forced to review the role of the Federal Conference. It was still seen to be a forum for decision making and policy development, as well as providing opportunities for networking and consciousness raising. The Federal Women’s Conference was to remain a professional development experience for women activists, therefore it should make space for ‘new’ delegates to the women’s conference because it must continue the regeneration of future women activists and leaders’ (AEU Women’s Officers’ Minutes, 13–14 Oct 1997, p. 9). The women’s committee returned to these issues after observing the mood and behaviour of the 1997 conference. It stressed, among other things, that ‘new feminism’ required the Women’s Conference to act as a forum for the sharing of personal experiences between older and younger women
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activists. Moreover, it took on board the conference’s position that it was necessary not only to maintain a strong feminist agenda at such meetings, but also to make women’s issues an integral part of the Union’s main activities and not, as was tending to happen, a series of ‘add on’ topics to policy development. Even so, the women’s committee observed that federal conferences and officers’ meetings could be more effective if they devoted their energies to fewer topics and issues rather than jumping from topic to topic. The Federal Women’s Conference of 1997 was the 10th such meeting since the generative Alice Springs conference. Its theme, ‘Public Education 2001’, was devoted to the future role of public education and the problems that women teachers and female students would have to overcome to secure quality education systems in the new century. Much of the conference, however, was devoted to national reconciliation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and the attacks on the status and rights of women by the Coalition government. In focusing on Australian education in 2001, the conference resolved to put gender equity, especially in women’s rights and girls schooling, back on the public agenda in education, and included a request to the Union to intensify its efforts in promoting gender equity (Decisions of AEU Women’s Conference 1997, pp. 1–18). Twelve months later the conference formulated a strategic plan for the next phase of the Union’s modernisation, especially to strengthen it as a national organisation. The women’s conference’s deliberations and final resolutions became the dominant text in the 1999 Federal Conference’s ‘Principles for Future Directions’ discussions.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander members In his paper ‘Emerging Issues for Teachers Unions’ (March 1988), Robert Bluer did not mention equity issues, even though the Commonwealth government was reducing all of its equity programs as part of its economic rationalisation strategies. Chief among these programs was Aboriginal education. Bluer appeared to acknowledge this omission six months later, when he stated that the Federation’s ‘most important commitment in the area of equity has been to Aboriginal education’ (Bluer Report, 1982–88, p. 7, ATF Executive Minutes). These two positions reflected the ambivalence of the national union towards Aboriginal participation in schooling and towards Aboriginal teachers in teacher unionism.
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The decade had started propitiously for the Federation’s engagement with Aboriginal education. Like many others in the community, teachers and their unions had been shocked by the World Council of Churches’ findings (1981) that not only was racism entrenched in Australia but also that the neglect of Aboriginal basic needs, including schooling, had led to widespread disease, alcoholism, illiteracy and unemployment. In this setting the ATF had participated in a National Aboriginal Education conference at Bendigo, where it was asked to raise the issue of Aboriginal education at the ACTU Congress. It did so, but not before the Federation formulated its own policy statement on the issue, which was endorsed at its annual conference in Perth. Before this national policy, Aboriginal education issues had been the domain of the state unions, but only the NSWTF, and SAIT had been involved in confronting some of the questions about relevant types of education schemes and Aboriginal involvement in the education processes. To give effect to its own policy, the Federation established a National Committee on Aboriginal Education, and appointed a coordinator for three months. Until this time no other teacher union had appointed an Aboriginal to any official position. Margot Weir, an Aboriginal who had worked in Northern Territory schools, filled the new position, and after some debate her three-month contract was extended for two years (1983–85). Weir was responsible for increasing awareness within the Federation and its affiliates about Aboriginal education issues and bringing before the Commonwealth government, directly and through various political networks, the need to improve Aboriginal education facilities, programs and teachers in what some saw in the Federation ‘as the area of greatest need in Australian Education’ (Bluer Report, 1982–88, p. 7, ATF Executive Minutes). In the 1983 federal election the ATF produced its first election pamphlet on Aboriginal education. It condemned the Fraser Government for ignoring its recommendations for improving Aboriginal education, especially its lack of encouragement for the training of Aboriginal teachers, its refusal to establish a National Aboriginal Education Commission, its refusal to effectively promote Aboriginal Studies in schools and its unwillingness to fund Aboriginal education properly. The ALP, it pointed out, had promised to address these problems. The ATF concluded that any future government ‘must guarantee Aboriginal responsibility’ in all aspects of Aboriginal education ‘to show they believe in cultural self-determination’ (Weir, Aboriginal Education Officer Papers, 25 Sept 1983).
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The ATF’s Aboriginal education policy, significant as it was for the period, was undermined by the union’s internal ambivalence over the role of the coordinator. As most state unions expected the coordinator to have a hands-on approach to local implementation, they were not interested themselves. Weir, supported by the national officers, saw her primary role as monitoring local activities and adding impetus to the federal campaigns of Aboriginal groups to improve their access to schooling (Weir, Aboriginal Education Officer Papers, 14 Nov 1983). At one stage it appeared that the Federation might abandon the position or place it in the mainstream of other national officers’ workload (1983). Later, at the request of the NTTF, the Federation executive decided to relocate Weir’s position as a field representative to Darwin, the site of greatest need for a sophisticated policy. This decision, however, was rescinded after pressure from its own Aboriginal Education Committee and more importantly after outright opposition to the relocation from the NSWT (ATF Executive meeting, 7–8 Nov 1986). (This union could claim the high ground in the debate because it had appointed its own Aboriginal education officer in 1984; South Australia and the Victorian unions followed the NSWTF’s lead later, in the 1990s.) Weir was appointed for another two years in January 1985, but for personal reasons she resigned soon after. Another coordinator, Pat Fowell, was appointed after taking leave from the Commonwealth Public Service, but this appointment was not made until March 1986, after an unsuccessful search to find a suitable person in 1985. The mid-1980s were years of lost opportunities for the Federation to stamp its mark on the Aboriginal education debate in Australia. Not only did the loss of Weir to the ATF cause a hiatus in political relationships with the Aboriginal Education Advisory Committee, but also the Federation’s own committee struggled to involve affiliates in policy formulation. The most frustrating aspect was the lack of responses by most affiliates to the committee’s ideas and proposals (AE Committee Report for 1987, p. 6, AEU file 1.8.1). Part of the problem was that until 1988 only three affiliates – NSW, South Australia and the ACT – had established Aboriginal Education committees. To signal a more pro-active approach, the Aboriginal Education Committee recommended to the 1988 ATF conference that affiliates should boycott any Bicentennial programs in schools ‘which do not address the Aboriginal perspective’. As well, affiliate members should be encouraged to express ‘solidarity’ with Aboriginal people by joining any ‘Bicentennial’ protest activities organised by local communities.
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In a similar mood the Federation’s committee persuaded the union’s leadership to coalesce with others in the trade union movement to support a national coalition of Aboriginal organisations’ request to the ACTU to include an ‘Aboriginal Affairs’ strategy in its emerging ‘A Fairer Australia’ text. The ATF was directly involved in this phase of the ACTU’s formulation process, so that on equity issues in education and welfare issues the ACTU would be able to demonstrate ‘a closer, more positive relationship between the trade union movement and Aboriginal people’ (ATF Executive Minutes, August 1987). The 1989 ACTU Congress adopted a far reaching policy on multiculturalism and Aboriginal affairs, and in its policy it emphasised the union movement’s active support for native land rights and the development of industrial awards for all Aboriginal workers. Using the language of the ATF, it stated that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (ATSI) were the most educationally disadvantaged group in Australia and that this should be addressed immediately by Commonwealth financial support and by the direct involvement of ATSI people in all educational decision making (Australian Teacher, No. 24, Nov 1989). A third impetus to the development of Aboriginal education awareness in the Federation came from another marginalised group in the Federation, the women’s caucus and conference. At the 1987 Women’s Conference in Melbourne, which was also attended by a small number of Aboriginal women teachers, it was decided to make Aboriginal women’s issues the theme for its 1988 conference. This would be done in order to focus directly on the rights and needs of First Australian women during the nation’s celebration of two hundred years of European settlement. This was a logical choice of theme for women teachers, but the organisation of the conference was novel and innovative. The Women’s Conference decided that it should convene in the Northern Territory, at Alice Springs, so that many Aboriginal women could attend and mix and engage with the large number of women teacher unionists who were expected to attend so that they could share the cross-cultural experience. The Federation’s executive and conference supported the idea and agreed, along with the affiliates, to meet the additional expenses required to bring both Aboriginal and nonAboriginal women to Alice Springs. Later, the federal government, through its Office of Women and Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET), agreed to fund the travel and associated costs for ATSI women to attend the conference. The Aboriginal Women and Education Conference, as it became known, became ‘a happening’ of significance for the Federation,
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although it had to compete with the Federation’s hosting of WCOTP World Congress in Melbourne in the same year. Between 30 September and 2 October 1988, some 300 women, including approximately 120 ATSI teachers, educators and community workers, converged on a caravan park near Alice Springs to discuss Aboriginal education. Small groups of women unionists literally sat on the ground besides their indigenous sisters and listened to their stories, experiences and ideas on being Aboriginal and working in ATSI schools and other learning centres. Towards the end of the conference the participants made a number of recommendations that included: The specific needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls is recognised as an issue. However, we must stress that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the indigenous peoples and therefore we recommend that the Government address the total needs of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to ensure survival and well being. Recognising the needs of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls in education must be given particular attention. The state/territory and national education decision making process must involve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who will ensure that these needs are addressed. Without addressing the gender bias in existing Australian cultures it is not possible for women to move forward as equal partners in society.
In November, a delegation of women, including ATSI representatives, waited on two Hawke Government ministers and expressed their concerns to them about the problems of and possibilities for Aboriginal education. One point of concern, which the government would later address, was the lack of any Aboriginal women and the absence of any Torres Strait Islanders on the new Interim National ATSI Education Council. From the Women’s Conference in Alice Springs and the Federation’s role in the ACTU ‘Fairer Australia’ declaration, the teacher union came to recognise that it must begin to consider the incorporation of Aboriginal teachers into its own affairs. In 1989 the Federation agreed that its own Aboriginal Education Committee should consist only of indigenous people. At the same time it confirmed that Aboriginal teacher representatives should have permanent observer status at its conference and executive meetings and with this special status their representatives should have speaking rights. Two years later, when the Federation became the AEU, it creat-
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ed a permanent position for a Federal Aboriginal Education officer who must be of indigenous race. These decisions were as much symbolic as they were the accumulated effects of the Federation’s experience of the 1980s. Moving to further enfranchisement of ATSI teachers would require more deliberate steps, the foremost being intensive union training of ATSI members or preparing for self-determination in the federal union, and a minor ‘cultural revolution’ within the union movement to enable ATSI members to be accorded a special place in the union’s governance. The climate for this change in attitude came from a new political consciousness about Aboriginal affairs that was apparent in the Union’s new industrial policies and political strategies. The obvious factor in this climate was Aboriginal Reconciliation. This idea and movement had taken off in the Bicentennial year after Prime Minister Hawke had called for a treaty between the Australian community and the Aboriginal peoples at Barunga, Northern Territory in June 1988. In order to develop the reconciliation process, his government later established the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. Meanwhile the government moved slowly, but steadily towards encouraging Aboriginal self-determination, self-management, new indigenous governing bodies and a national system of land rights. The spirit of reconciliation, so potent of possibility in the early 1990s, would later be challenged by populist reactions to High Court decisions on native title and Labor legislation to implement the transfer of title to Aboriginal peoples. From this point (the mid-1990s), the reconciliation process would stall due to increasing contestation. The Union embraced reconciliation wholeheartedly between 1990 and 1992. It has not deviated since from the original beliefs and goals of the Hawke/Keating governments. It could be witnessed immediately in its emotive resolution at its 1992 conference to support the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991) and called on federal state and territory governments to provide ‘the necessary funds for urgent implementation’ of its comprehensive recommendations. The Union’s most obvious practical response was to introduce or sponsor ‘cross-cultural awareness’ training programs as part of its TUTA curriculum. These programs were established in its federal office, in conjunction with the other education unions, and in its branches and associated bodies. The response of the branches was consistently solid, but the real breakthroughs in the growth of these programs came from Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory unions where Aboriginal affairs, for different rea-
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sons, had been largely neglected. Yet the external tide against reconciliation ran as strong as the Union’s programs, as a QTU report of its involvement in a national program in October 1994 noted: The struggle to achieve goals of Cross Cultural Awareness was echoed over the cab radio on the way to the Albury Airport, when John Laws reprimanded an indigenous person who was attacking white invasion. Laws arrogantly said, “Yeah, well if we didn’t invade this land 200 years ago, you wouldn’t have a telephone to complain with. (Arthur Hamilton 1997, Attachment 14)
Of course, the rise of (Pauline) Hansonism and ‘One Nation’ in Australian politics since early 1996 has given an even stronger definition of the importance of these types of programs for teachers and teacher unionists. The second factor, interrelated to the reconciliation movement in Australia, was the labour movement’s revived interest in social justice and pay equity issues related to indigenous workers. As Prime Minister Keating told the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in February 1992 ‘the best way to provide a basis for reconciliation is to close the gap in living conditions’. This concern, often disjointed or passive within the ACTU and the ALP, had appeared in the labour markets’ agenda of the mid-1980s. It was to be picked up by the ACTU and eventually became part of its ‘A Fairer Australia’ statement. Before this, however, the Hawke government accepted in principle the findings of its Aboriginal Employment Development committee (1987) which had examined the way to improve the opportunities and conditions of employment and training of Aboriginal workers. The main findings concentrated on the economic injustices, lack of training and employment opportunities and discriminatory practices experienced by Aboriginal wage-earners and the unemployed. The fact that the Hawke Government became indifferent to the plight of these workers because of the downturn in the national economy forced the ACTU to intervene more forcefully in its Aboriginal Affairs portfolio towards the end of the decade. The appeal was that the union movement should take up the issue of wage injustice for Aboriginal workers. The location of a subsection of these workers in the education industry was an obvious challenge to the teacher unions. The Union fully supported the employment of Aboriginal teachers and Islander Education Workers (AIEWs) in schools and other institutions catering largely for indigenous students. Initially the ATF had endorsed the National Inquiry into Teacher Education (1979) recommendation that there should be at least 1000 Aboriginal teachers in schools by 1990.
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This target and strategy had been the crucible for the ATF’s initial involvement in the Aboriginal Education movement of the early 1980s. It was therefore disappointed and, after 1987, reactive at the failure to meet this target (by half), but aware that many other ATSI workers were employed in schools and TAFE institutes as allied staff. Many of these workers’ employment was largely unregulated and there were wide disparities of salaries and conditions of AIEWs in schools between the states and territories (AIEWs are defined as ATSI teacher aides, ATSI teacher assistants, community teachers, home/school liaison officers and Homework Centre workers.) Since 1982, the ATF’s Aboriginal Education Committee had been calling for improvements in AIEWs’ conditions of employment, but it was not until 1989 that the Federation, now imbued with the new ACTU principles of Aboriginal wage justice, decided that the best way to achieve national regulation of these education workers and improvements in their salaries and working conditions was through a special federal award. Indeed, an industrial agreement for this category of workers had been reached in South Australia following negotiations between the SAIT, the CPSU and the Public Employment Commissioner. On the advice of SAIT, the Union acknowledged that before a national log of claims could be submitted to the AIRC, there needed to be a systematic review of the work of AIEWs, their career structures, working conditions and award provisions. There also had to be intensive preliminary negotiations between the Union and various other unions that covered some of these AIEWs’ groups. The latter could be left to the Union who, as seen earlier, was engaged in a number of industry rationalisation schemes with these unions. The material situation of the AIEWs, however, required sophisticated labour market research. In December 1989 the federal government was approached to fund this research (Davina Woods’ paper to ATF Executive, Nov 1991, AEU file 1.8.1). The Union’s request for official support for the research ($156 000) did the rounds of Canberra ministerial and departmental offices for nearly four years before DEET agreed to fund most of the research, with the remainder coming from the Union and its branches. In March 1995 the first two stages of the research on AIEWs (conducted by Ms Patricia Bucksin of the South Australian Education Department and Bill Highnett of SAIT) was released by the AEU under the title, ‘ARA KUWARITJAKTU project: Towards a New Way.’ This research was the first national study of AIEWs’ working conditions and highlighted the importance of these educational workers in
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the formal schooling of ATSI students. Its findings and recommendations would be used in the AIEWs’ industrial case and in the long-term objective that by 2001 employers of AIEWs would have reviewed their existing employment practices in preschools, schools, TAFE institutes, community colleges and universities and ensured substantial improvements in their conditions of service, including tenure and pay. The results of the study were to be used also as supporting material in a federal log of claims for AIEWs’ terms and conditions of employment. Of these workers, 1245 were school-based, 93 officebased and 173 worked in preschools in 1992. The Union’s Aboriginal Education Committee and the federal officer, acting in concert with the ACTU, had decided as early as 1991 that a federal award, constructed from a national claim, was the only way to overcome either the substantial award variations in AIEWs’ pay and conditions between jurisdictions or the lack of their industrial regulation in some states. A Union log of claims, closely following the Aboriginal Assistant Teachers Award in South Australia, came before the AIRC in early 1992 (AIEWs, AEU file 72.1.1). The hearing stalled after other unions who also covered AIEWs in some states objected to the Union’s application. After these objections were withdrawn, and South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory indicated they would not object to the finding of a dispute, the AIRC found that a dispute existed between the Union and the three state employers. In October 1992 the AIRC ordered that the dispute be resolved by direct negotiations and possibly conciliation between the Union and the individual employers (Transcript, 14 Oct 1992, AEU file 72.1.1). An example of the outcome was an agreement reached between the Union’s Northern Territory branch and the employer body to create a salary scale and career path for 260 Aboriginal assistant teachers, which became a federal award late in 1994 (Territory Educator, January–February 1995). The move towards establishing a national award was seriously delayed by the ‘allied staff’ union coverage (Section 118) dispute (see Chapter 5). Since the AIRC’s decision on this in November 1996, the Union has been forced to move slowly to convince the other unions involved of the need for a joint union application. National reconciliation and economic justice were, therefore, the main external influences on the Union’s disposition towards empowering Aboriginal teachers and other education workers within its governing bodies. Before this could occur, however, the Union had to train these groups for active citizenship in the Union. The first course, a national course conducted by TUTA, was held in September 1990, in
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conjunction with a meeting of the Union’s ATSI Education Committee. The ‘first-level’ course had the following as its objectives: By the end of the course, the participants will be able to: 1. Identify the major issues confronting the various sectors of education – primary, secondary, TAFE and higher education; 2. Analyse the main issues confronting the various sectors of education – primary, secondary, TAFE and higher education; 3. Define the implications of current changes in education for the salaries and conditions of members of the teaching unions; 4. Participate in the various forms of union structure which includes being able to critically assess reports and policies; 5. List proposals for the implementation of the ATF/ATU Aboriginal education policy; 6. Summarise the history of Aboriginal involvement in, and relationships with the union movement; 7. Evaluate how unions can help Aboriginal educator unionists to achieve their individual and collective aims; and 8. Demonstrate group cohesion. (AEU file 1.8.1)
A second-level course was held early in 1992 and the cycle was repeated subsequently, including a combined training course and annual meeting of the ATSI Education Committee. The August 1992 training course for these committee members and others who had already attended the stage one TUTA courses offered by Clyde Cameron College, Wodonga, was an introduction to policy development. The group was given essential training to help the members review and consolidate the various statements and decisions of the Union on Aboriginal affairs and education. This exercise was to provide the basis for the revision of the Union’s policy, which was endorsed by the Union in 1993 and, with further work, became its ATSI policy on education that was adopted by the Union in January 1995. Later on, particularly at the branch level and TAFE, the training programs were fused with the Union’s cross-cultural awareness programs. The effectiveness of the training schemes were apparent even by 1993. That year, the United Nation’s International Year of World’s Indigenous People, the Union was confident enough to convene a conference for ATSI members titled ‘Claiming Our Place’, at which they began to map out the ways for self-determination of indigenous members in education systems and in the Union. The conference also continued the examination of the ATSI education policy of the Union.
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Later that year the AEU sent a delegation of 12 ATSI members to the World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education at Wollongong, New South Wales. The branches paid for Pat Fowler (then in the USA), who had first mooted the idea of an Australian-based conference, to return to Australia to participate in the conference (Davina Woods’ 1994 paper to Reconciliation Seminar 1995, AEU file 1.8.7). Twelve months later the AEU and the New Zealand Educational Institute submitted a detailed paper to WCOTP on a new approach to the education of indigenous peoples. In 1995, following a special seminar on reconciliation, the Union’s Federal Conference adopted the ATSI education policy and called for an action plan to implement the key proposals in the policy. Chief among the many proposals was that the Union support ATSI union training until 2001 and establish an annual conference of ATSI Unionists to be used as a training ground for ATSI educators in the fields of: 1. 2. 3. 4.
strategies to cope with racism; cross-cultural understanding; coping with students’ dissatisfactions; coping with the non-Aboriginal questions regarding Aboriginality/Abstudy/priority placements etc.
It also expected that on ‘all AEU policy development’ ATSI members must be consulted, and represented at all national decision making bodies. At the 1996 Federal Conference another special seminar was held to review the level of action taken federally and in the branches since the last conference and to prepare a timetable for full representation of ATSI members on the AEU. To encourage this process, each branch was urged to appoint a full-time ATSI Education Officer and to activate the work of their ATSI Education Committee. Trade union training activities were to be intensified and it was expected that ATSI members would be given preferential entry to other TUTA courses during 1997 and 1998. In January 1997 the Union’s Federal Conference proposed to increase by one the federal executive seats, to provide for an ATSI member to be elected by his or her national standing group, and to increase the representation of branches and associated bodies at federal conference by one for those with 10 or more ATSI members. In announcing the decision to the media, Sharon Burrow, the Union president, commented that this endorsement of self-determination for
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its indigenous members was part of the national reconciliation process. It: …was the first by any public body in Australia ... If we think of how difficult it has been for women, then it has been very hard for Aboriginal members to rise to leadership positions. (Koorie Mail, 29 Jan 1997)
To effect these rule changes the AEU had to ensure that its proposals did not offend the Racial Discrimination Act and discriminate against its non-indigenous members. It used the term ‘special measures for securing adequate advancement’ of ATSIs to satisfy the Industrial Registrar’s approval on the new rules. Twelve months later, in the company of the first elected ATSI Federal Conference delegates, the AEU Federal Conference offered a formal apology to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Later it enthusiastically endorsed a policy on Reconciliation with the ATSI peoples and agreed to establish Aboriginal Reconciliation committees in all branches and associated bodies. In February 1998 a special Federal Conference amended the AEU rules to include an ATSI delegate elected by and from the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Committee to the federal executive.
Union sources consulted ATF Women’s Conference & Women’s Officers’ meeting 1987–89, NBA Z219 Boxes 245, 249 AEU Federal Women’s Conference & Women’s Officers Minutes, AEU file 1.9.1 Aboriginal Education Officer papers (M. Weir) 1982– 88, NBA Z219 Boxes 237–42 ATF Aboriginal Education Committee, Boxes 224– 7 AEU Aboriginal Education Committee, AEU file 1.8.1 ATSI Education Committee, files 1.8.5 and 1.8.6 AEU Aboriginal Reconciliation Seminar 1995, file 1.8.7 ATSI Education Workers (AIEWs), AEU file 72.1.1 Arthur Hamilton, AEU Nomination for 1997 Australian Reconciliation Awards, folio (1997)
5 Part of an Industrial Relations Revolution As long as the Arbitration system remains (and it has withstood conservative attacks in the past) its basic role is the settlement of disputes as provided in the Constitution. This means that violent shifts are less likely and conditions are somewhat insulated from the whims of opportunist politicians. Robert Durbridge, July 1988
Introduction On the eve of the Union’s formation, the early 1980s, despair was prevalent among Australian state school teachers and their schools: their employment conditions had continued to stagnate, school funding had contracted from the heady days of the early 1970s, and there was little public recognition of their place in the community. Moreover, their unions in the states seemed exhausted by their industrial and political struggles with governments and education departments, while their widespread, almost universal, industrial stoppages in 1981 and 1982 appeared to achieve little to nothing for members (Spaull & Hince, 1986, pp. 37–38). Within the national arena, the Fraser Government seemed indifferent to public education, special programs or unemployed youth. National institutions, like the federal arbitration commission, appeared to succumb to the government’s calls for ‘wages freezes’; indeed the National Wage Case of May 1982 decided not to grant any pay increases. This decision, along with the federal
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and state commissions’ refusals to award catch-up wages claims, were positive in one sense: they ensured that wages policy and employment issues would dominate white-collar unions’ agenda for the rest of the decade. This was certainly true for the Federation and its affiliates, though in 1982 they were still constrained by a constitutional harness that denied the federal ‘labour power’ to them. Nevertheless, it was time for the Federation to seriously consider (for the first time since the mid-1920s) whether it could provide national leadership on teachers’ conditions of employment to the rank and file members who belonged to its affiliates. At best, the ATF had provided only guidance in the form of its biennial surveys of working conditions (first conducted in 1976) and more frequent national meetings of unions’ salaries officers. But until 1983 there had not been a major policy debate on teachers’ salaries or even a conference workshop. Moreover, the ATF governed without the benefit of a standing committee on these matters; it did not employ an industrial officer (the librarian collated most of the interstate conditions material), nor argue any national viewpoint on general wages and incomes policy, much to the embarrassment of its new peak-union council, the ACTU. As Bill Kelty told an ATF executive meeting in June 1982: ‘Never have I seen so many different approaches by an employee organisation in the same industry’. The time had come, he said, for the ATF to adopt a national approach to salaries negotiations by using ‘a common claim’ (Marginson paper to ATF Executive, 14 Oct 1982). Obviously provoked by the ACTU Secretary, the 1983 annual conference held a salaries workshop, endorsed the establishment of an ATF Economy Committee and in 1984 elected an industrial officer (Di Foggo). There was also a notable increase in the dissemination of industrial information to the affiliates, in ways similar (but more low-keyed) to the ‘industrial intelligence’ services provided by the National Education Association and the Canadian Teachers Federation. This marked shift in discussion and policy making on salaries issues between 1983 and 1986 placed the ATF in a more confident position to engage in the labour movement’s debate on national wages policy, as developed in the Hawke Labor Government’s Accord with the ACTU. The ATF annual conferences and executive meetings became sites for a growing disenchantment within the teachers’ unions with the wages components of the Accord, and the government’s deregulatory and eventually deflationary economic policies. Thus the ATF executive roundly condemned the Hawke Government’s June 1986
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Economic Statement because it would further deny salary justice to teachers and reduce Commonwealth financial support to public education (ATF Executive meeting, 25–26 June 1986). Similarly, it criticised the wage bargaining elements in the new Accord, which on Bill Kelty’s initiative proposed a two-tiered wage claim structure, the second tier allowing for wage increases if productivity increases could be demonstrated before industrial commissions. As the ATF president Graham Marshall grumbled to members, this was not an option for the teacher unions because the second-tier approach was only ‘a safety-valve’ for industrially strong unions (Australian Teacher No. 18, 1986, p. 9). The Industrial Officer would voice similar concerns after the National Wage decision in March 1987 (ATF Executive meeting, 27 March 1987). In the public arena, the ATF was more circumspect. It instructed its delegates to the ACTU’s special unions conference in November 1986 to vote against Kelty’s proposal, but only if other public sector unions were of the same mind so that the ATF would not be seen as an isolated opponent of the ACTU plan (Special ATF Executive meeting, 31 Oct 1986, item 8). It would eventually go along with the ACTU national wage case submission in 1987, and later in the states, to obtain the 4 per cent second-tier increase by ‘unreal’ productivity trade-offs. As one local activist recalled, the 1987 National Wage decision requirement, ‘discredited the wages principles, poisoned their relationship to education and revealed the use to which they could be put by employers interested only in cutting costs’ (Durbridge, 1991, p. 85). Thus, until the mid-1980s when the ATF at last entered the industrial arena, it had behaved like most of its affiliates by reacting to events rather than shaping them. In this industrial behaviour it was seen as a highly dependent organisation, dependent not only on the state affiliates and the federal and state governments, but also on the ACTU. It needed to move onto the offensive, to cultivate a pro-active industrial profile, a profile that benefited a prospective new federal union.
Designing new industrial strategies After five years of Labor Party ascendancy in national and state politics, the Federation realised that no government was prepared to address seriously the various dimensions of the crisis in school teaching which had plagued Australian education for over a decade. But by 1987–88 there was at least some prospects for acknowledgment of a
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new approach to teaching’s problems, and recognition of the economic value of school teachers. The new federal minister, John Dawkins, who came to office in July 1987, appeared committed ‘to developing a more national approach to schooling and the closer integration at a policy level between schooling and the economy’ (Preston, 1996, p. 166). This was consistent with the ACTU’s new emphasis on the reskilling of the Australian workforce and the underlying attention to quality educational and training provisions. But the ACTU’s main strategy was to adapt from overseas’ practices, as found in Australia Reconstructed (1987), a measure of labour market reform that would focus on productivity improvements as a ‘second-tier’ trade-off for wage increases. This was the embodiment of the ACTU’s new ‘strategic unionism’ in which it hoped to outmanoeuvre ‘the New Right’ and John Howard’s Coalition’s calls for labour market deregulation, by using the arbitration systems to introduce its own brand of labour market flexibility. Of course, the initial move towards productivity bargaining, as found in the 1987 National Wage decision, gave no joy to the teachers who still demanded a pay system based on compensation and work value and not a manufacturing industry’s concept of productivity gains. This was a major dilemma for the teacher unions. The ATF did not complain openly, however, because it did not wish to disturb the new positive, two-way relationship with the ACTU leadership. Besides, it faced other dilemmas as a trade union. The main one was that the Union, having been registered as a federal trade union in February 1987 and having intervened in the federal higher education case so that it became a party to NSW College Lecturers’ Award in October 1987, had to decide what were to be its primary industrial strategies. In the light of the above settings, and the recognition of it as a trade union in the federal industrial relations system, it had to decide in 1988 where to direct its industrial energies. Certainly the Federation could sit back as it did at the annual conferences in 1987 and 1988 and complain further about the increasing irrelevance of the Accord and the AIRC’s National Wage determinations to school teachers and TAFE lecturers (Annual Conference Resolution on Wages, Jan 1987). It could also beat its chest and call on the ACTU to propose a new wages system that would suit the needs of teachers and other white-collar service workers. This included not only maintaining real value of wages and the capacity to restore lost real wages, but also unions being able to ‘pursue work value and comparable worth cases without the imposition of arbitrary ceilings on
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claims or narrow interpretations’ (Annual Conference Decision, Jan 1988). The Federation then wanted to see how the ACTU would refine its claims for a two-tiered wage system before the AIRC, which ultimately that year (August 1988) would produce the Structural Efficiency Principle, a more pronounced system of award restructuring (long-term productivity) and industry-wide bargaining between unions and employers as part of their review of awards. In the meantime, as the 1988 annual conference noted, Queensland and Tasmanian teachers, dissatisfied with their salaries conditions’ cases being handled by their state industrial commissions, had been exploring the possibility of a federal award. The TTF was the more active of the two. In late 1987 its members had taken a number of industrial actions including bans to obtain a state arbitration hearing. At the last moment the TTF had withdrawn all its conditions of work claims and decided to resort to a public relations campaign to achieve its objectives (Tasmanian Teacher, 8 August 1988, p.14). At the same time it threatened ‘to go federal’, and asked the ATF to help it obtain a federal award on these matters. This request raised the concerns of several affiliates about the desirability of the new ATU applying for federal awards. NSWTF’s delegates to the January 1988 annual conference had warned the Union that none of its branches or associated bodies, except for the ACTTF and NTTF, should be supported in this way without a dedicated discussion of the federal awards’ issues in the presence of the Union’s legal advisers. The ATF executive in March 1988 resolved that the federal union should continue to assist any branches who wished to make an award application to the federal commission, but that in the meantime there should be a ‘legal seminar’ on federal awards, along the lines proposed by the NSWTF. The NSWTF’s concerns were that the TTF should not pre-empt the possibility of a federal award for all state school teachers when economic and political circumstances warranted a national approach to improvements in teachers’ conditions of employment. There was also the possibility that the Tasmanian case would be appealed by the states to the High Court, which might find against federal awards for school teachers as it had done in 1929 (NSWTF paper, 15 March 1988, ATF Executive Minutes). The Federation’s national office believed that the Tasmanian affiliate could obtain a federal award if it prosecuted a log of claims that were identical to those of the two unions in the territories. But if the Tasmanians merely sought a federal award as a relief from its dissatis-
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faction with the Tasmanian industrial commission its application would fail (Durbridge, ATF Discussion paper, ‘Options for Federal Awards’, May 1998, ATF Executive Minutes). The ‘legal seminar’ in May canvassed many of these issues, but was persuaded by the recurring question from the Union’s legal advisers and NSWTF delegate: ‘why it was that a Federal School Award was desirable’? As the seminar’s ‘conclusion’ noted, this question required a legal answer on the industrial rights and conditions of teachers around Australia, and in political terms ‘on the link between Federal regulation and funding and resourcing public schools’ (ATU Legal Seminar, 19 May 1988, ATF Executive Minutes). The hesitancy about seeking federal awards for teachers was grounded on advice that as a result of a federal award case involving Queensland electricity workers seeking to leave the state commission, the High Court had ruled that the AIRC should dismiss an application if a state industrial commission was competent to deal with an industrial dispute. This hesitancy was compounded by the ATF’s acknowledgment at the seminar that the states in general would oppose any attempts by the teacher unions to derogate their control of state-employed teachers to a Commonwealth agency, which the AIRC was. This would be despite, or as a result of, the Commonwealth government proposing that a national approach ‘to strengthening Australian schools’ (a paraphrasing of John Dawkin’s ‘May 1988 Statement’) implied a national approach to the industrial regulation of teachers’ work. The seminar advised the ATF executive that the federal office investigate the new award restructuring processes and its applications to teaching awards as a means of advancing an integrated wages claim, and that federal coverage of specific employment issues be developed into a draft national claim. These propositions were accepted by the ATF executive in June 1988, so that a federal award claim covering common conditions such as leave, secure credits, superannuation and special geographical allowances could be developed into a portability entitlement claim for interstate transfers of teachers without penalty. The TTF’s campaign to secure a federal award would be encouraged, however, and the Union would offer to provide legal assistance to the Tasmania branch. These decisions were reached with a relatively high degree of unanimity, as the NSWTF was now more sympathetic to exploring the concept of a federal award after having endured four months of the Greiner Coalition Government. This new government had already shown its hand to the NSWTF by ordering an increase in teachers’ workloads and a substantial reduction in teacher numbers.
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On the question of a federal award for Tasmania’s teachers, the TTF withdrew its threat to the state government and confined its dispute over working conditions to the local political and industrial arenas. Thus by mid-1988, the ATF had before it the quandary of which way to proceed in its industrial strategies. It could decide to follow the road to federal awards for teachers, or the road to the national coordination of an industrial campaign that would aim to improve substantially teachers’ salaries and career structures in each state and territory. It decided to travel down both roads simultaneously. It would prepare a portability of entitlements claims as a federal award for all state school teachers, and it would coordinate nationally a structural review of teachers awards in line with the Structural Efficiency Principle and these would be then negotiated and possibly adjudicated at the state and territory levels. But the Union did not completely abandon its interest in obtaining a federal award. As Durbridge told teachers in mid-1988: A Federal Award option is at least a prudent alternative for a profession under attack; at most it could be a part of restoring public education to the centre of the nation’s concerns where it belongs. (Australian Teacher, No. 20, 1988)
Award restructuring The Union devoted most of its industrial energies in late 1988 to constructing a national framework for award restructuring following the National Wage decision of August 1988. Most state unions were already attempting to negotiate some form of reclassification of teachers’ career structures so that they could obtain salary increases for experienced teachers without having to trade off productivity increases. The ATF executive decided in September 1988 to assist these local developments by suggesting a number of principles that the state unions could adopt in their negotiations. These included: 1. Increases in all rates by a revaluation of skills recognising the gender-related devaluing of human service and public sector rates; 2. A career structure which encourages the gaining of knowledge and skills through academic and/or practical qualifications by in-service, leave or own-time contributions in agreed proportions; 3. A salary progression which enables teachers to remain in the classroom without penalty or to choose administrative and school leadership roles;
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4. A greater emphasis on beginning teachers, their support and development; 5. No acceptance of ‘merit’ or ‘differential’ pay; and 6. Peer assessment and support for teachers whose performance is questioned, career alternatives in education-related activity and voluntary measures to be available without penalty. Peer assessment to be linked to professional development programs. The federal office, in conjunction with a workshop of the state unions, used these principles to develop a national framework for award restructuring as part of its new wages policy. This was developed initially by Robert Bluer and Robert Durbridge on the advice of Ray Costello, who had joined the National Skills Formation Council. The Union’s distinctively educational construction of award renewal was examined by the ACTU to see whether it satisfied the ACTU’s concept of award restructuring. The Union’s construction of award renewal comprised three related steps: an increase in minimum pay rates to ensure that the restructuring was made on an equitable basis; broadbanding of skill classifications; and career advancement based on criteria of training, performance and experience. At the same time, the ACTU assisted the Union in developing its national salaries’ benchmarks, which were consistent with the pay relativities for engineers contained in the Metal Trades Award. The Union’s proposal, therefore, would attempt to increase the ‘ teachers’ class’ salaries by 10 per cent in 1989–90, while providing about $1400 increase to the next incremental scale to a maximum annual salary of nearly $40 000 (for teachers who had been teaching for at least eight years). Experienced teachers who moved beyond this maximum as the first step of an advanced teacher classification would obtain a 12 per cent increase in salary (ATF Action Circular, 9 Dec 1988). The 1989 annual conference considered a detailed set of options from the executive on how to construct a national framework for award restructuring. In sum, the conference endorsed a framework that established national salary benchmarks, a common incremental scale with access for three-year trained teachers and the Advanced Skills Teacher classification. The Union’s national campaign on award restructuring involved the federal officers in making a basic, common submission to the state industrial commissions and providing framework information and trends to the state unions in their negotiations with employers. The Union’s submissions always insisted that teachers’ award restructuring, especially as related to careers, was developed in response to the
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needs of the public education systems, the needs of the teaching workforce, especially the substantial changes in ‘ teachers’ work’, and the need to conform with the AIRC’s Structural Efficiency Principle (Durbridge ‘Award Restructuring Options’, 6 April 1989, AEU file 71.1.1). The Union coordinated both the salaries’ benchmark claims of the state unions and the award restructuring campaign. In assisting the unions on these issues, the federal office worked closely with the ITF on teachers’ salaries in non-government schools and also enlisted the support of the ACTU leadership, which in turn appeared before state commissions to praise the work of teachers and endorse their particular industry approach to award restructuring. The teachers’ award restructuring framework was seen widely as a creative way to adapt the ACTU plan to the work of teachers. The ATF and ITF schemes were submitted to the AIRC review by the ACTU in February 1989 (ACTU Draft Blueprint, 1989, pp. 105–7, AEU file 71.1.2). In particular, the Advanced Skills Teacher (AST) classification provided a career option that stressed the most important aspect of a teacher’s life, classroom teaching. The underlying rationale of AST, which was titled ‘the philosophy of AST’ in all subsequent union submissions, revolved on a set of propositions including: (i) that recognition of AST would be self-based on actual teaching, not additional duties; (ii) the classification would not have quotas; (iii) that as a skillbased criteria it would reward experienced teachers; (iv) that it would also act as incentive for younger teachers to develop and maintain these skills; and (v) above all else, the AST classification would keep teachers in the classroom rather than moving into school administration. Negotiations between states and the unions between 1989 and 1991 were intense and complicated. The benchmark salary for a four-year trained teacher was a constant source or disagreement and even ‘caused’ stoppages, with the states claiming that they could only afford some $37 000, p.a. against the Union’s claim of $40 000 p.a. Similar disagreements occurred over the AST classification, especially on the AST’s duties, qualifications and selection. Most employers were basically suspicious of the concept because they perceived it as yet another union grab for salaries increases, and that it would apply to all experienced teachers, not the few who were promoted into a quota, as the existing career structures required. To overcome these local stalemates, the Australian Education Council (AEC), which included the Commonwealth Minister for Education, decided to enter into national negotiations with the Union.
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This decision, which ushered in an employers’ standing committee, made some progress with interim salary increases and acceptance of the AST in several states until the Commonwealth’s promises to provide financial supplementation to the states was substantially withdrawn. The states, however, still relied on ‘states’ rights’ to argue that a national approach to teachers’ industrial relations would undermine their sovereignty, while several states perceived that the whole issue was another attempt to extend Commonwealth power over schools (Durbridge, 1991, p. 88). The stalemate, which occurred at the national level, was only broken after March 1990, when the Commonwealth Minister proposed that the ongoing debate on the quality of teachers’ work be referred to an ongoing national consultative process which became the National Project on the Quality of Teaching and Learning (NPQTL) and the benchmark salaries issue be returned to the state jurisdictions (ATU Officers’ meeting, 23 April 1990, ATF Executive Minutes). The role of the Union in the NPQTL will be discussed in Chapter 6. The Union, however, was relatively satisfied with its national industrial campaign, though it was not until November 1992 that the last state, Tasmania, introduced the national salary benchmark, and then only after an arbitrated decision. The Union had met its basic objectives in the campaign: restoration of teachers’ salaries and the acceptance of a classroom-based career path for teachers. But in the implementation of these principles, the states and territories’ teachers’ awards had fallen short of the Union’s original demands. The maximum benchmark rate was $38 000 p.a. (not $40 000 p.a.), although in most states three-year trained teachers gained access to the maximum scale, and the AST had been introduced at the first (lower) level, but not the other two levels without quotas. Durbridge believed that, at least, the introduction of the benchmark was a substantial improvement in teachers’ pay conditions. Durbridge concluded: ‘It is the greatest increase in wages coming to teachers collectively that has ever occurred in this country’ (Australian Teacher, No. 29, 1991, p. 8). This was Union hyperbole meant for the consumption of members, many of whom had obtained significant salary increases for the first time in over a decade. Against this were the arguments of employers and some academics that the award restructuring campaign was a waste of time, that it was not understood by teachers, that in its applications it divided teachers and it did nothing to effect workplace reform in school education (Baldwin & Sharpe, 1996, pp. 81–2; Angus, 1996, pp. 124–5). Several Union leaders, who also were disappointed that the campaign did not meet the expectations which Bluer and others had
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hoped for in 1988, point to a short-lived period of national collaboration on changing teachers’ work, and a wider realisation among the education industry leaders and state industrial commissions that the professional and industrial problems of teachers needed to be tackled together to improve the quality of teaching for schooling in the 1990s (Burrow, 1996, pp. 112–13). But there were other hidden benefits of the award restructuring campaign that favoured the Union’s development. The new Union came to be recognised by education employers as a teachers’ body capable of ‘carefully crafting’ a national industrial package (Baldwin & Sharpe, 1996, p. 58). It was also seen by outsiders as much better organised than the new national body of education employers in national negotiations, which is understandable given that by 1990 education leaders at these negotiations were restrained by governments of all persuasions dedicated to reducing public expenditures. Moreover, the Union’s clever adaptation of the ACTU’s plan for award restructuring strengthened the Union’s standing in the labour movement, especially its industrial wing. Prior to 1988 the Union’s status in the labour movement was frequently problematic. The teachers’ industrial campaign also strengthened the relationship of the federal union with the state and territory membership, whose traditional loyalties were towards the established unions. This was critical to the Union in the ‘transition phase’ of its development that saw the Union replace the Federation as the national voice for teachers. The new union, through a national industrial framework, found it could be consultative with the state unions as well as with their membership. This was graphically illustrated in the Sky Channel national TV hook-up in March 1990, which allowed an open debate about the campaign’s problems between the federal body and rank and file activists. Of course, the overall relationship between the federal union and the state bodies still varied in degrees of strength from union to union. As Durbridge recalled of the establishment of the national negotiations structure, ‘Some in the unions were wary of the loss of autonomy to a central process but a viable alternative was hard to find’ (1991, p. 88). There was one overwhelming lesson for the federal union from its award restructuring campaign that its officers only admitted to in 1995. It was: [T]hat to undertake the same exercise could only be effectively and efficiently undertaken again under the federal system where the fundamental nature of the jurisdiction was based on the need to solve one
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True, the Union would extend its salaries’ benchmark campaigns between 1993 and 1995, but again the unions were forced into discrete negotiations with their state and territory employers that, in most of their outcomes, ignored the national framework. The lesson was obvious: the Union must rely on its other strategy to obtain federal awards.
Portability of entitlements award A log of inter-service entitlements had been developed in 1988 as part of the state and federal officers’ attempts to draft a log of claims for salaries and working conditions. The particular log aimed at providing portability of entitlements, such as for all leave provisions, superannuation, salary status and promotion prerequisites. It had been included in the national framework for award restructuring, but the 1989 annual conference decided that the Union should press for a distinct federal award on portability of entitlements. The only internal obstacle was that the state unions could not agree on a common claim for control of entry/initial qualifications for teachers, so this was removed from the log of claims (ATU to Branch secretaries, 27 Oct 1988, AEU file 71.1.1). The Union executive hoped that state union secretaries would negotiate the claim with the state employers, so that if agreements were reached a federal consent award could be made by the AIRC. Most education authorities refused to enter into negotiations. The ACT and NT felt that the log of claims should go to arbitration, others refused the letter of demand, while a number of states warned the Union that if it persisted with its claim, states like Queensland would challenge the right of the federal commission to process such a dispute (J.T. Lunn QDE to ATU, 22 Feb 1990, AEU file 71.1.1). The AIRC found in October 1990 that industrial disputes existed over the claim between the Union and the state and territory education departments. The Union then attempted to negotiate the claim with the AEC employers’ standing committee used in the award restructuring negotiations, but it was not prepared to accept the condition that the standing committee must enter into salary negotiations before considering the portability claim (ATU to Convenor AEC Standing
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Committee, 12 March 1991, AEU file 71.1.1). The Union requested a Full Bench hearing to clarify the earlier dispute finding as a preliminary step to seeking arbitration of the log of claims. The states objected to the original 1989 findings on the grounds that the possibility of a federal award was unconstitutional as it would interfere with the states’ sovereignty over employment policies for teachers, that the entitlements in the claim were not part of an industrial relationship and therefore did not create an ‘industrial dispute’, and that the Union’s demands were ‘meaningless’ and ‘vague’. In December 1991 a Full Bench found that the AIRC had jurisdiction to make an award to provide teachers who moved to employment in another education department with portability of entitlements. This was the most important part of the decision, because the AIRC was ruling on school education for the first time. It found the Union as a federally registered union could make industrial demands on the states and that if these demands were not responded to by state employers an arbitrated award could be made. The Full Bench dismissed the states’ objections to the supposed lack of an industrial character of the dispute, and while it noted that the Union’s ‘claim is badly drafted and it is hostile to understanding’ found that this did not make the demand vague or meaningless (40 IR, p. 474). As expected, several states sought to appeal the decision to the High Court, but before doing this the AEC’s standing committee invited the Union to meet with the employers’ group and see whether portability entitlements of inter-service teachers could be regulated by ‘formal administrative’ arrangements, that is, departmental regulations, rather than by an industrial award. Their offer was tantamount to asking the Union to revoke its right to seek a federal award and rely instead on reaching agreements with each of the states, which may or may not have become registered state industrial agreements. The Union declined the invitation and decided to ask the AIRC to establish a hearing on the merits of creating a federal award for portability of entitlements (AEU Executive Minutes, 19 June 1992). Before this occurred, the states of Western Australia and New South Wales obtained from the High Court a postponement of an AIRC hearing so that the Court could decide if the AIRC had the jurisdiction to make an award. In December 1995, after Western Australia withdrew its appeal before the High Court (New South Wales was to do the same in 1996), the Union approached the AIRC to have the portability dispute re-listed as a matter for arbitration between the Union and all the states and
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territories. The AIRC agreed to a re-opening, but insisted that the Union should attempt to negotiate agreements with the state employers. Negotiations have so far proven fruitless and the Union’s claim remains in a legal limbo (Industrial Report 1996 to Federal Conference 1997, pp. 5, 6) Six years after the Union had become a registered trade union in the federal industrial system what had it achieved in its efforts to obtain federal awards for teachers? In the first place, it had won the sole right to represent state school teachers following the unsuccessful attempt by TAA to obtain federal registration. But the Union’s record in the federal commission fell away after that success. It was a party to first awards in higher education in New South Wales and Queensland, which by agreement with the NTEU it then vacated in 1992. It also was a principal party to higher education awards as they affected the payment of school teachers who supervised student teachers in training. Moreover, the Union obtained a ‘dispute finding’ in its AIEW’s claim, but had not proceeded to seek an award. The same situation was true for its claim for portability of inter-service entitlements, though in this case the states had effectively delayed the AIRC from making an award. Finally, it had obtained federal awards for teachers and TAFE instructors in the territories. All of this activity had imposed heavily on the Union’s time (and branches) and expense in mounting and pursuing federal awards, without a tangible result. Furthermore, the Union’s attempt to move into the federal arbitration system had come when industrial relations systems were moving slowly but inevitably towards using ‘enterprise bargaining’ as the way to achieve labour productivity in Australia. Award restructuring was the first step in this movement where it would be expected that employers and employees would take responsibility for their own industrial affairs and not have third party, intervention by industrial tribunals. Already in 1992 new state legislation in New South Wales encouraged these processes and it would spread to other jurisdictions soon enough. The AIRC also had established ‘enterprise bargaining principles’ in its October 1991 National Wage decision. Ultimately the Commonwealth’s Industrial Relations Reform Act 1993 would establish enterprise bargaining as the primary means of settling industrial disputes and regulating conditions of employment. The Union had been warned as early as 1989 by the ‘National Left Unions’ caucus that enterprise bargaining in public services would not help improve teachers’ salaries and conditions because it would encourage employers to insist on productivity trade-offs for
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salary increases. This was confirmed by the teachers’ experience of award restructuring negotiations at the state and national levels. Thus the Union, along with other public sector unions, eventually persuaded the ACTU that enterprise bargaining was inappropriate for these service industries. At the Union’s 1992 conference it resolved to avoid enterprise bargaining in salaries cases, if possible, and use it only for the industrial development ‘of a more consistent and mobile teaching profession’. In September 1992, the AEU decided to harness the interstate industrial material which it had been gathering since 1988 to build a comprehensive, national log of claims on salaries and conditions and serve it on all employers as a first step to obtaining a federal arbitration hearing. The Federal Conference in January 1993 endorsed this action, but after a ‘false-start’ a Union letter of demand and the log of claims was served on state and territory education departments. The employers refused to negotiate the log. The Union then claimed the existence of a dispute and the AIRC agreed in October 1993, finding that an industrial dispute existed between the Union and employers in Victoria, South Australia and the territories. Later its dispute finding was extended to Tasmania, and later still to Western Australia. In reaching these decisions, the AIRC rejected a number of technical objections from the states on the authorisation of the Union’s letters of demands (in the future the Union would make rule changes to ensure that federal officers could lodge a claim), and it also found against the states on: whether this was an ‘interstate dispute’ and that ‘teaching hours’ did not constitute an industrial matter (AIRC Print K9642). The Full Bench did, however, remove principals and deputy principals from the dispute finding, pending a determination on whether they were ‘school teachers’. They were included again some years later. The Union did not proceed immediately with its national log of claims because by the end of 1993 it was engaged in a major struggle with the states, the AIRC, and ultimately with the High Court, on the issue of federal awards for its Victorian branch members. This engagement would become the centrepiece of the Union’s industrial strategies for the next four years. As a result of events in Victoria in 1992 the Union would push for discrete awards to protect teachers’ industrial rights and conditions of employment in those states where governments ‘extinguished’ existing regulatory arrangements for their own employees (Durbridge witness statement, 1995, p. 15, para 44).
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The Victorian school teachers’ disputes In 1988 the Victorian Labor government had abolished the defective Teaching Service Conciliation and Arbitration Commission and brought teachers within the jurisdiction of the state Industrial Relations Act 1979. This meant that, for the first time, Victorian teacher unions could avail themselves of compulsory arbitration. Consequently, the teacher unions sought to regulate most of teachers’ terms and conditions of employment by a general award (1989). The Opposition parties, which after the 1992 election became the Kennett Government, had cast an increasingly critical eye on the state teacher unions, not because of their industrial power, but because of their close, but informal, links with the Labor Party. The unions’ support for the ALP during elections and the appointment of union activists to management and advisory positions in the Department were grounds for complaint by non-Labor parties, but much of this rhetoric was derived from a general proposition that trade union power in Victoria had contributed to the supposed economic decline of Victoria. Immediately after the October 1992 election, the Kennett government introduced the Employee Relations Act 1992 and the Public Sector Management Act 1992 as part of its radical labour market reforms. The State Teachers’ Award 1989 and all industrial agreements were abolished by this legislation (Spaull, 1997b). Another way the Kennett Government’s used the Public Sector Management Act 1992 was to implement a major reduction in the size of the state teaching service. The government’s decision enabled the Directorate of School Education, later the Department of Education, (DOE) to process 2175 redundancies at the end of 1992. This action met with organised opposition from the state teacher unions. In particular, as state branches they called on the Australian teachers’ Union, (now the Australian Education Union) to seek a federal order from the AIRC to prevent further redundancies, unless agreed to by the unions. The AEU was quick to agree to the branches’ crie de coeur, and it also received a request from its Tasmanian branch that feared the introduction of teacher redundancies in Tasmania. The Victorian Teachers’ Redundancy case was pursued in the federal commission on the understanding that, like others in the education industry, school teachers could obtain awards pursuant to the Commonwealth’s Industrial Relations Act 1988. The hearings, however, were later constituted under the Keating Labor Government’s 1992
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amendments to the Act which reduced the AIRC’s discretionary powers to refrain from hearing matters which could be decided by a state tribunal. Before the amendments to the Industrial Relations Act had been passed in December 1992, the AIRC made an interim award for Victorian state school teachers that restricted the DOE to effect further redundancies or to introduce retrenchments to the teaching service. On appeal, a Full Bench ordered a re-examination of the dispute issue, which was found to exist, and the redundancy claim. A new interim award was then made covering Victorian state school teachers for three months. The decision, although finding no coercion in the offering of the voluntary packages, criticised the processes available to teachers contemplating packages. The Full Bench refused to freeze the redundancies, but said teachers could withdraw from the arrangements by 31 December 199 (46 IR, p. 22). Another Full Bench in June 1994 issued a second interim award and directed that the AEU and the DOE confer to develop an award that would incorporate the AIRC’s views on voluntary teacher redundancies. But the AIRC did not rule against the introduction of compulsory redundancies (AIRC Print L3846). The AIRC replaced the interim award with a final award, the Victorian Teachers’ Redundancy Award 1994. The key components of the award for Victorian teachers were that there must be both industrial regulation and prior consultation with the unions on (i) all teacher ‘excess’ matters, (ii) redeployment and training opportunities, and (iii) voluntary separation. The issue of compulsory retrenchment would be considered later by the AIRC, and urgently if the DOE were to attempt any retrenchments. The Victorian government’s appeal of the AIRC’s decision on the Redundancy Award was heard by the Industrial Relations Court. In July 1996, it upheld the validity of almost all the Award’s provisions. The government sought special leave to the High Court in the hope of invalidating further provisions of the award. The AEU also achieved success in its original 1993 application to the AIRC, which found that an industrial dispute existed between teachers and their state employers in the territories, Victoria and South Australia. (as discussed above). In December 1993 the AIRC, having found earlier that an industrial dispute did exist between the DOE and the Victorian teachers, made the Teachers (Victorian Government Schools) Interim Award. The award restored the terms and conditions of teachers that had existed in agreements on staffing and conditions and the State Teachers’ Award 1989 before the introduction of the
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Kennett Government legislation. A Full Bench in March 1994 confirmed the finding of dispute, but varied it to exclude at that stage all provisions relating to teaching hours and class sizes and it expressed the desire that these matters be subject in the first instance to negotiations between the education department and the teacher unions (56 IR, p. 1). A new interim award based on these provisions was made on 1 July 1994. In July 1995, after a lengthy hearing, the AIRC ruled on the matter of face-to-face teaching. It ordered that it be the same as for New South Wales teachers which was, in effect, an increase in contact time, at least for secondary teachers. The decision was significant in that the Commission recognised the need to place limits on contact time for teachers. It rejected the Victorian government’s argument that this should be left to the education department. The AIRC refrained from ruling on class sizes, arguing that these should be negotiated in schools and if these failed they could be referred to Board of Reference under its jurisdiction. It stated, however, that teachers should not be expected to carry an excessive workload (AIRC Print M3410). (So far the Board of Reference has rejected all individual teachers’ claims of excessive workload based on class sizes). The Victorian government appealed the AIRC’s finding of a dispute and the making of interim awards for teachers to the High Court. Its application was constructed on complaints that the federal awards impaired the capacity of the state to function as a government or would do so; that they impaired the existence of the state as a sovereign entity or would do so; that they interfered with the administrative services of the state; and that the AIRC had exceeded its jurisdiction as well as erring in finding an industrial dispute, when it was confined to only one state, and before the AIRC had determined the parties to the dispute. These last two issues were remitted to the Industrial Relations Court. The other matters were considered by the High Court in Re Australian Education Union case as part of the Victorian government’s 15 applications to the Court to return Victorian public employers to the state’s industrial relations system (see later). In 1995 the AEU sought a major increase in Victorian teachers’ salaries (of 10.67 per cent). This was made in the context of the government’s attempt to impose a career restructuring which required, among other things, annual performance reviews of teachers. Its scheme, called the Professional Recognition Program (PRP), was voluntary in that teachers who applied for it were required to sign a quasi-individual agreement before they were considered for advance-
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ment. The AIRC accepted the AEU’s argument that its pay claim should be heard as a special case in line with National Wage Case principles that allowed for variations of awards for recognised increases in work value of occupations. During the case the AIRC refused to arbitrate on the dispute and ordered that the DOE and the Union work towards a certified agreement that would address not only the salary issues but also the structure and content of the PRP. Negotiations broke down as the parties failed to find any accommodation of the major principles in the two alternative career systems. The Union also rejected the PRP scheme because it claimed that it was an official attempt to undermine the award system, and that it had only received support from some 20 per cent of teachers. The AIRC resumed its role as an arbitrator of the dispute. On 1 March 1996 it awarded teachers who were not in the PRP scheme a 5 per cent increase in salaries and incorporated in a slightly modified form the PRP scheme of classification and pay rates in a new award for all teachers. Later in 1996, the Union sought from the AIRC an arbitrated safety net adjustment of $8 a week increase for teachers, as it had done successfully in 1994 and 1995. This third application was refused, however, because the Bench found that salary increases had been obtained as a result of the enterprise bargaining that had preceded the salaries and careers award of 1 March 1996 (AIRC Print N2940). In doing so, the Commission rejected the Union’s argument that the salaries increases awarded in that decision was not distinctly separated from the enterprise bargaining in the ‘PRP dispute’, even though that process had failed to reach an agreement. The union appealed the decision to a Full Bench, which quashed the decision to reject the application and ordered a re-hearing, which granted the $8 a week adjustment. Earlier in December 1996 the DOE, in anticipation of a new salary claim, offered all school staff individually a 6 per cent increase in two parts over two years, providing that they signed an acceptance of the offer and that they would not make any further salaries claims until February 1999. In response, the AEU announced it would seek by negotiation a 14.5 per cent increase for all staff, but that individuals should accept the 6 per cent offer as the first instalment of this claim. It also impressed upon its members that they should also sign a union declaration form that authorised the AEU to pursue further phased-in salary increases. The Victorian government’s failure to prevent the AIRC making awards for its teachers, nurses and public servants culminated in an eventual High Court hearing in Re Australian Education Union (1995).
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The state’s argument went to the issue of implied limitations in the Constitution as to whether a state government as an employer could be governed by a federal agency’s rule making. The application was constructed on claims that the federal awards had impaired the capacity of the state to function as a government or would do so; that they had impaired the existence of the state as a sovereign entity or would do so; and that they interfered with the administrative services of the state. The High Court found that the AIRC had the powers to set terms and conditions of employment for state-employed teachers, nurses and clerical and administrative staff. It reached this conclusion after examining the industrial disputes of Victorian state employees, including school teachers, who had transferred to the federal commission’s jurisdiction. The Court found that although the implied limitations of the Constitution protected the existence of the states and their capacity to function as a government it did not go so far as to prohibit Commonwealth legislation which interfered with the states’ capacity to exercise governmental functions. Even so, there was a note of caution in the judgement that any federal award that sought to regulate particular industrial matters of state public employment might infringe on the implied limitations in the Constitution (184 CLR, p. 188). The Victorian government asked the AIRC to examine the teachers’ awards, or proposed awards, in light of the Re Australian Education Union decision on implied limitations of award prescriptions for state employees. In September 1995 the AIRC dismissed the government’s applications to quash or modify the teacher’s awards, except for that part of the Teachers’ Redundancy Award which related to the period of retention for teachers declared redundant. In the other High Court case, Victoria and others v The Commonwealth (1996), which the states mounted against the Keating Government’s extensions to the Industrial Relations Act 1988 by imposing international labour conventions on the states, the states had more success. The court found that these employment provisions did not exceed the International Labour Organisation (ILO) conventions, except for certain aspects of unlawful termination and redundancy situations in state employment. As a result, federal award clauses providing for severance pay and union consultation in redundancy situations are not binding on state employers. The outcomes from these two High Court decisions were that after Re Australian Education Union, the Teachers Redundancy Award was read down by the Industrial Relations Court so that it allowed the
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Department to reclaim the right to fill vacant positions from whoever it selected, and not from teachers declared in excess. In September 1997, following the Victoria v Commonwealth decision, the Victorian government applied successfully to the AIRC to have most of the Teachers Redundancy Award set aside.
Other educational workers in Victoria Having secured federal awards for Victorian state school teachers, the Union was forced to focus on securing similar awards for other education workers in Victoria, and for school teachers and others in the other states where governments had also embraced the philosophy of deregulation of the public sector labour markets. In December 1992 the Union’s federal executive endorsed a TAFE division proposal to seek a federal TAFE award for all territories and states except Tasmania, New South Wales and Queensland. Three months later the AIRC found that a dispute existed between the Union and various TAFE employers. This finding was confirmed on appeal on 29 October 1993 (AIRC Print K9692). In the Victorian TAFE sector, the TAFE College employers’ group and the Union negotiated an industrial agreement following the AIRC’s confirmation of an industrial dispute finding. After six-months of patient work, the employers and the Union agreed to roll over the former TAFE award into a federal consent award which was approved by the AIRC in May 1994. Attendance hours and an annual leave loading were two matters that could not be agreed on, however, and were subject to an arbitration hearing. A 17.5 per cent annual leave loading had been paid to TAFE teachers since 1975, but it was not part of the original award. The loading had been removed by ministerial order in 1993 and employers claimed that it was unnecessary to continue to pay the loading because TAFE teachers enjoyed 10 weeks of leave. The unions argued that the denial of this leave bonus payment discriminated against Victorian TAFE teachers because in certain institutes they worked alongside academic and general staff who received the loading, as did all other TAFE teachers in interstate institutions. Commissioner Frawley sided with the unions’ argument because he viewed the entitlement as an established benefit in the Australian workplace. Moreover, he concluded. ‘... I was given no cogent reasons as to why this benefit was removed as it was by unilateral action’ (AIRC Print L3494, p. 6).
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The other outstanding matter requiring arbitration was a dispute over teachers’ minimum hours of attendance at TAFE colleges. Prevailing practice indicated that teachers were expected to be at a college for a minimum of 30 hours a week, with the remaining eight hours allowed for working at home. The college employers wanted teachers to attend college for a minimum of 38 hours a week, not to carry out additional teaching duties but to improve the flexibility of staffing in colleges. The commissioner was not persuaded by this argument, stating that it would be a departure from established practice if he ordered an increase in minimum attendance time. ‘Industrial reality’ must be recognised, he said. The unions and employers had consented to the making of a federal award which, the commissioner found, had in effect rolled over the previous state award and therefore the minimum attendance requirement should be preserved in the new award. The TAFE employers appealed these decisions but a Full Bench in October 1994 confirmed the interim award (AIRC Print L5892). Later it became the first award for Victorian TAFE teachers. Under the guidance of the AEU, TAFE teachers in other states rolled over their state awards into federal awards between 1995 and 1997 (AEU Federal Executive meeting, 9 June 1995, item 10.3). The Victorian Kindergarten Teachers’ Award was made in the same way as the TAFE award in June 1994. The AIRC accepted the AEU’s claim that two former state awards which covered kindergarten teachers and play leaders should be rolled into an interim award. But the AIRC would not accept the Union’s submission that some workers who were on individual contracts or collective agreements with kindergartens should be able to opt out immediately from these agreements in favour of the award. The Commission ordered that these arrangements should remain until the end of 1994 and after that all relevant workers would be covered by the kindergarten award. In the same year a similar interim federal award was made for teachers and other education professionals who worked in Victoria’s state disability centres, formerly the ‘special schools’ (AIRC Print K9931).
The Northern Territory All of this AEU industrial activity had occurred in the emerging federal jurisdiction of the Victorian education industry. This had been the Union’s main preoccupation between 1993 and 1995 but the federal office also had to maintain its industrial efforts in the established fed-
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eral arena of the territories. This was particularly true of the Northern Territory, where the overall size and dispersal of branch members required the Union to materially assist their struggles against an increasingly hostile government. Throughout 1993 the AEU in Melbourne had helped serve a log of claims on the Territory’s Commissioner of Public Employment and then, in the company of the branch’s officers, negotiated a certified agreement on employment conditions with the commissioner. This was ratified by the AIRC in March 1994. The conditions of 320 relief teachers, who were employed by local school councils for not more than 15 days an engagement, were not part of the agreement. The government insisted that this practice should encourage localised bargaining as part of its devolution of authority to schools. The Union disagreed arguing that relief teachers’ work would remain largely unregulated and they should be covered by a centralised territory award or agreement (Territory Educator, May–June 1994, pp. 7–8). The dispute came before the AIRC in May 1994 when the relief teachers’ draft award was presented to the Commission by a Union federal officer, Tony Lawrence. The AIRC found that the Union and the employment commissioner should discuss pay rates and the appropriateness of a certified agreement for relief teachers (AIRC Print L5018). At a subsequent AIRC hearing, the Territory government indicated it wished to return this employment function to the Commissioner of Public Employment (Territory Educator, July–August 1995, p. 3). Later, relief teachers’ employment conditions were included in a new certified agreement for Territory teachers.
Developing a new industrial strategy The Union’s campaign to secure federal awards for school teachers in the other states had stalled during its efforts to secure federal awards for Victorian teachers. But the other branches’ more vocal claims for federal regulation of teachers’ employment conditions could not be ignored indefinitely because conservative governments in Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia were not only restructuring their industrial relations systems but also their teaching services. By mid-1994 the Union had obtained ‘dispute findings’ in school employment from the AIRC in all states, but there was a sense of uncertainty about how the Union should proceed to obtain interim
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and final awards, especially in those states where teachers were being removed from the traditional regulatory processes of conciliation and arbitration. Federal industrial law, as amended by the Keating Government in December 1992, provided opportunity for teachers and unions who had lost their access to state arbitration systems to move to the federal system, providing that they could demonstrate this clearly to the AIRC. In June 1994 the Union executive discussed at length the best ways to proceed towards federal regulation of teachers in Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia. The encouragement of enterprise bargaining by both federal and state commissions obviously ruled out the idea of a national salaries claim (besides it did not have the support of most of the Union’s branches and bodies). In the end the Union pursued discrete federal agreements in Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia by initiating in each state a period of bargaining with the employer on all employment conditions affecting teaching, but with a priority given to salaries’ increases. The difficulties in implementing this type of piecemeal approach were twofold. First, the AIRC might decide that it would consider the question of jurisdiction before anything else, and this would become a costly and time-consuming process for the Union. Second, ‘picking off’ the states one by one would place enormous pressure on the federal office’s financial and human resources (AEU Federal Executive meeting 9–10 June 1994, item 3.1). Tasmania achieved almost a ‘bloodless revolution’ in the move by its state teachers towards federal awards. The Tasmanian branch had been interested in obtaining a federal award for almost five years, largely because many teachers’ employment conditions were not subject to award-making but remained the preserve of the government and education department administrative regulations. In 1993 the government indicated that because of its claims of ‘incapacity to pay’ it would use special legislation to override any ‘unfavourable’ wages decisions made by the State Industrial Commission. These included any decisions on teachers’ salaries. Understandably apprehensive of this threat, the Tasmania branch of the Union was attracted to a federal award because, as it wrote, the federal jurisdiction under the Keating Government’s reforms ‘was more employee friendly than previous Federal or state (industrial) acts’ (Tasmanian Education Review, April 1994, pp. 6–-7). With the help of the federal office, the Tasmanian branch served a draft federal log of claims on the education department in April 1994.
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In response the Department, directed by the enterprise agreements provisions of the 1993 amendment to the Tasmanian Industrial Relations Act 1984, offered the teachers nearly a 5 per cent increase in salaries. The Union accepted the offer, but on the condition that acceptance did not prejudice the branch’s right to seek a federal award. Negotiations on the draft award continued for the rest of the year until the Tasmanian government declared that it would not oppose the making of a federal award for school teachers. A federal consent award which respected existing ‘departmental’ conditions and the salaries levels, rates of pay and related conditions contained in the 1994 schools’ enterprise agreement was approved by the AIRC on 23 December 1994. Both the Tasmanian branch of the Union and the Tasmanian government believed that the move of teachers to federal regulation of their employment conditions would create a healthier, more positive industrial relationship in Tasmanian schools providing, as it did, improved opportunities for consultation between the Union and the education department, and in the words of the branch, ‘less resort by government to unilateral changes to teachers’ employment conditions’ (Tasmanian Education Review, December 1994, p. 2). The Tasmanian experience was a substantial footnote to the changes to teachers’ industrial relations systems which had occurred after the election of conservative governments in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. All had embraced, by varying degrees, the industrial deregulation of their state labour markets and the return of managerial prerogatives in employment policies affecting public sector workers, including teachers. These ‘reforms’ alarmed teachers, their unions and ultimately the federal union. As Federal Secretary Durbridge suggested to subsequent hearings in the AIRC: AEU members are employed by State governments and thus are in the precarious position of being employed by an employer which has a capacity to affect the terms and conditions of employment by executive or legislative action and also by being the entity which can determine the composition and powers of State industrial tribunals. Accordingly, there has always been a need, in order to maintain confidence in any State system of regulation of State employees, for the State to keep separate and distinct its different roles as employer and legislator as well as guarantor of the independence of tribunals. In the past, State Governments by and large have respected the separation of roles involved and have not confused their legislative policy program with their function as an employer and overseer of the independence of tribunals. Unfortunately, in the past two years, the perception of AEU
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Durbridge’s argument was pertinent to most states and territories, but it was submitted to a jurisdictional hearing on a claim for federal regulation of South Australia’s state school teachers. The election of the Brown Liberal Government in December 1993 saw the repeal of the South Australian Industrial Relations Act 1972. The new Act intended for a major shift in emphasis away from conciliation and arbitration to workplace bargaining between an employer and a group of employees rather than a trade union, unless the majority of employees voted to have a union act on their behalf. Unlike Victoria, the state industrial commission remained operative, but with significant constraints on its powers to arbitrate disputes. As in Victoria, the Brown Government appeared dedicated to reducing public expenditures on education, reducing the size of the state teaching service and eroding the working conditions and entitlements of those teachers who remained in schools. Acting on the government’s threats to teaching as proposed in the state budget for 1993–94, the AEU applied directly to the AIRC to grant an interim order to preserve existing conditions as a step to obtaining a full hearing on the possibility of a federal award for South Australian state school teachers. It claimed that the government had refused to consult with the branch on proposed changes to teachers’ employment (on this point, the AIRC criticised the government for failing to observe the expected consultative processes required by an industrial commission in any discussions on retrenchments) and therefore the Union claimed the federal commission should provide protection for South Australian teachers. In October 1994 the AIRC declared that South Australia was not Victoria. The state industrial commission, it found, had not been completely stripped of its arbitral powers, nor was the South Australian government expressly committed to retrenching teachers. Therefore Senior Deputy President Riordan ruled that it would be premature for him to make an interim award (AIRC Print L5810). The Union’s response was to notify the AIRC that it was moving into a bargaining period in respect of teachers’ salaries and conditions, and after the government and education department refused to enter the negotiations, the AEU applied to the AIRC for a federal award. At a preliminary hearing the South Australian government indicated that it would challenge the Union’s application by claiming that the dispute could be heard by the South Australian industrial commission,
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and that the Union, in singling out South Australia, was asking the federal agency to discriminate against a particular state. The Union’s response to the latter was that this case was part of the Union’s national industrial strategy, but that it had been forced to concentrate on particular states as teacher members sought federal protection from state governments. During the application by South Australia for the AIRC to refrain from further hearing or determining the dispute, it was decided by the AIRC to join the application with one from Western Australia. Events in Western Australian schooling had overtaken the South Australian case; indeed all of the other teacher unions claims, so bitter had become the struggle between Western Australian teachers and their government. The Court Coalition Government, which came to office in February 1993, was determined to introduce its own brand of labour market deregulation to Western Australia. Its principal act, the Workplace Agreements Act 1993 allowed employers and employees to opt out of the state award system and conclude either individual or collective agreements in the workplace. The legislation also had a strong anti-union bias in that unions were precluded from exercising any control over the actual contents of a workplace agreement. (In 1995, the international trade union movement condemned both Victoria and Western Australia governments for their violation of the representational rights of trade unions.) In 1994–95, the state government and its education department moved to apply the new industrial legislation to the state schools and TAFE sectors. The Government School Teachers Tribunal was abolished, and a workplace agreements’ package which replaced teachers’ terms and conditions contained in the Teachers’ Award and Working Conditions Agreement 1992 was offered to teachers. The new conditions included: performance-pay based on a principal’s assessment; abolition of incremental salaries scales; incorporation of teachers’ voluntary activities into normal duties; mandated teacher professional development in a teachers’ own time; and school-based selection of staff. The government also offered an across the board 5 per cent salary increase (the Union had claimed a 20 per cent increase) and another 10 per cent increase to those teachers who would sign an individual contract embodying the new conditions. Most teachers rejected the package. Between March and the end of April the SSTUWA attempted to negotiate a new offer with the education department, but the government would not entertain any revision of its original offer so the union
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withdrew. It activated a series of industrial bans in schools on voluntary and ‘non-timetabled’ teaching duties, accompanied by a number of short mass meetings in school time of teachers. Later in the year, after the SSTUWA launched a second wave of industrial bans which seriously disrupted school activities, the education department retaliated by ordering principals to name teachers who carried out bans. Meanwhile the government set in process the removal of ‘union concessions’, namely the deduction of union fees from the teachers’ payroll system, and the deregistration of the SSTUWA from the state industrial system. The 1995 teachers’ dispute was one of the fiercest industrial contests seen in Australian education and although its impact on schooling was not as great as the Western Australian teachers’ strikes of 1920 and 1934, it was a signal to the community at large that state school teachers were not prepared to accept individual employment contracts. Along with many other state unions in Western Australia, the local branch of the AEU sought to move to federal coverage to avoid placing teachers under the new Western Australian industrial legislation. The Union’s first application for an AIRC determination on its proposed final award was submitted to the AIRC in December 1994. The government challenged it in April 1995 by applying to the AIRC for it to refrain from hearing the case, claiming that the case could be adequately dealt with by the state industrial commission. The Union made a second application for an interim order in May 1995 after it had broken off negotiations with the education department and commenced its direct action campaign. The AIRC deferred a hearing on the dispute. Instead it directed the Union to approach the state commission to have the immediate industrial action resolved, and await its own determination on which industrial commission could properly deal with the teachers’ dispute (AIRC Print, AEU file copy, 4 Oct 1995). This question of jurisdiction in Western Australia was joined by the AIRC with a similar application from the South Australian government. The jurisdictional dispute under section 111(1)(g) of the Commonwealth’s Industrial Relations Act 1998 was to become the major ‘education industry’ case for 1995. The joining of the two government applications on this complex question would present the presiding officer Mr Justice Munro ‘with the most arduous and difficult of the decisions I have been required to make in the time I have been with the Commission’ (AIRC Print M7299, p. 133). It took six months to conclude after 25 days of hearings in Adelaide, Perth, Sydney, Broome,
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Port Hedland and Alice Springs, as well as inspections of 10 remote community schools in Western Australia (which, in the printed notes of inspections appended to the final decision, provide splendid observations on the experience of teaching in isolated Australian bush schools) (pp. 142–49). The Union’s submissions stressed that its application for federal awards for teachers in Western Australia and South Australia were part of its broader campaign to secure federal regulation of teachers’ employment conditions in what it regarded as a national education industry. But it emphasised that it had to prioritise its efforts where local issues arose as a matter of urgency, especially when the inadequacies of state industrial regimes placed teachers and their unions at considerable risk. Its case was supported by the ACTU and the Commonwealth government. The states’ response was that as they were constitutionally responsible for the direct delivery of educational services in each state, and that as education was a public utility for which each state government had a high level of political responsibility, the federal commission should not intervene to disturb the way their teachers’ employment conditions were determined. In his finding released on 30 November 1995, Mr Justice Munro acknowledged the states’ sovereignty in school education, but equally he acknowledged that there was a national education industry and national policy frameworks in education decision making. Moreover, the Union’s claim for the exercise of federal regulation of teachers’ employment conditions had to be seen in the context ‘of the recent but rapid growth of it as a national organisation with industrial and political clout in educational services both nationally and at a State level’ (AIRC Print 7299, p. 135). He concluded that after taking cognisance of all these considerations, and the character of the industrial regimes operating in the two states, ‘there are sufficiently significant reasons to disturb existing arrangements and to adopt a national outlook’. He acknowledged that the AEU, ‘a substantive national organisation of employees’, had sought to remove the two disputes to the federal commission, and that in the public interest only the AIRC could effectively deal with these disputes. Leaving the disputes with the state industrial commissions, he wrote, would require the Union and its two branches to engage in a form of enterprise bargaining which would be to place them under ‘collective negotiation and organisational disadvantage’ as the representatives of teachers eligible to be Union members. Mr Justice Munro ordered that in each state the employers and the union meet, possibly in the presence of a Commission conciliator,
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to negotiate the contents of a new certified agreement which would be lodged with both the federal and state commissions (AIRC Print M7299, pp. 133–40). The AIRC’s decision that it could deal with the Western Australian and South Australian teachers’ attempts to obtain federal awards was appealed unsuccessfully by the two state governments to a Full Bench (AIRC Print N9074). The appeal, which took 15 months before a decision was handed down, stalled the Union’s efforts to obtain a federal award for state school teachers in South Australia and Western Australia. In the interim, the South Australian branch reached an enterprise agreement with the state education department on all terms and conditions of employment covering the state teaching service. This was approved by the state commission in December 1996 and registered with the AIRC as a certified agreement in April 1997. In Western Australia, another wave of industrial action by teachers in the second half of 1995 had to be resolved immediately. The Union persuaded Mr Justice Munro to make an interim order before he had ruled on the jurisdiction question. The order of 19 October 1995 required the government to halt its union deregistration demand and abandon its disciplinary actions against teachers and their union. All teachers were granted a 5 per cent salary increase, but the SSTUWA was required to suspend its direct action. Also, the Union and the government were ordered to reach an agreement on teachers’ conditions. This was not completed by the time of the order’s expiry and a second interim order was issued by the AIRC which kept open negotiations while protecting the Union’s right to finalise its application for a federal award. Late in December 1995 the Minister for Education was replaced by Premier Court and the state education department’s director resigned. The SSTUWA and the new Minister concluded a new agreement with considerable benefits to teachers early in January 1996. Mr Justice Munro approved this agreement on 16 March 1996 and two months later a similar agreement was certified by the state Industrial Relations Commission. In the 10 years the Union had been a direct participant in the federal industrial system it had moved some way to securing national salary and career structures benchmarks, as well as federal awards and agreements for school teachers and TAFE instructors (and a few other education workers groups in Victoria) in the territories and most of the states. The Federal Office’s ‘industrial’ shelves reveal that the AIRC had made over 100 decisions dealing with state school teachers
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and TAFE teachers, and that most of its orders, awards and appeal judgements had been sympathetic to the central proposition that teachers employed by states in a national education industry should have their terms and conditions of employment regulated by the federal system. But this transfer of industrial regulation had not been won easily by the Union and its branches. The ongoing, almost continuous, struggle to gain industrial ascendancy in the federal arena was aptly, if modestly, summarised by the Union in a later submission to a Senate inquiry. The AEU’s move to the federal system has been strenuously opposed by all State governments at virtually every step in the process which began in 1993. Appeals have been taken to Full Benches of the Commission, and a number of matters have ended in the High Court as the governments seek to pursue every possible legal avenue to prevent the AEU obtaining protection for its members in the Federal Commission. Despite the number of these challenges and the seemingly limitless financial resources of the governments ploughed into them, almost without exception they have failed. The most recent of these failures occurred in relation to Western Australia and South Australia when the Federal Commission determined that it should continue to deal with the AEU’s application for federal awards, rejecting arguments that the interests of employees were adequately dealt with by the respective State systems. As usual, this decision has been appealed to a Full Bench. The result of these developments is that federal award and agreement coverage of AEU members has been greatly expanded. (AEU submission to Senate Reference Committee 1996, p. 2)
The struggle was not over; the Union had other federal industrial claims to mount, win and defend. More importantly, the Union had to face a new challenge in the form of yet another conservative political regime that was dedicated to the wholesale deregulation of an industrial relations system. This time it was the federal government, a government now led by John Howard and his Liberal–National Party Coalition.
Union records consulted ATF Executive Meetings & Minutes 1983–88, NBA Z 219, Boxes 258–69 ATF Executive Meetings 198–91, AEU files 2.10.1 to 2.12.8 AEU Federal Executive Meetings 1992–96
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AEU National Wages (Teachers’) Campaign 1987–91, file 71.1.1 Structural Efficiency Principles, 1988–91, file 71.1.2 Federal Conference Papers, Reports etc 1992–96, FEUIC Annual Industrial Report to Federal Conference in Federal Conference Papers above, FEUIC AEU Submission to Senate Economic Reference Committee ‘Workplace Relations and other Legislation Amendment Bill 1996’ R. Durbridge, witness statement to AIRC S.111(1)(g), Hearings on South Australia, AEU exhibit 3, 8 May 1995
6 The Union and the National Politics of Education Teachers as a profession call for co-operation from ministers; stop squabbling, accept that education must be managed in partnership and those partnerships must dignify the teaching profession with the support to debate new and emerging philosophy, curriculum constructs and indeed to validate proposed changes prior to implementation. There is no point investing in public policy setting if the expertise in those employed to implement policy is not valued. Sharan Burrow, January 1994
Introduction The Australian Education Union and the Australian Teachers Federation have had one basic characteristic in common: they have striven to be the public voice of state school teachers and others in the national political arena. Whatever their place in the industrial arena, the two organisations have always acted as peak sectional associations for teachers attempting to influence national policies in education, more recently training, and other broad issues which interest their members. As a national pressure group, the Union’s pursuit of these strategies in the policy arena establishes it as a key influence on the national polity in education, of which the Commonwealth government and its administration, the inter-governmental councils and the various statutory commissions and corporations comprise the core elements. But
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the Union also seeks to influence the polity’s ‘gatekeepers’ – federal MPs, political parties and public opinion makers. Union access and participation is not automatic, and its influence is unevenly distributed across the system. The Union expects to be regarded as a permanent source of opinion and information, if not a partner, in collaborative policy making in a wide range of issues affecting school, TAFE and early childhood education. These are divided broadly into two main categories of policy interests. First, the social and professional aspects of teachers and curriculum and teaching, specifically in areas not covered by industrial regulation of teachers’ work. Second, issues in federal/state relations related to the funding and resourcing of education (except higher), specifically in the support of the states’ and territories’ systems. This includes the defence and promotion of public education and opposition to the privatisation of schooling. Like the state unions, the Union has tended to extend its interests beyond these traditional boundaries of teachers’ self-interests. Thus, the Union’s embrace of ‘macrosocial’ union functions as described by van de Vall (1970, pp. 53–85) and Spaull (1986, p. 6) is a characteristic of its modern strategic behaviour. In representing teachers and others in the national political arena, the Union sees itself as the voice of a major sectional ‘stakeholder’ in education. Therefore it frequently demands to nominate representatives to the various statutory bodies, official working parties and public committees of inquiry. Where this type of access is not available, or is denied to it, the Union adopts the usual forms of influence: direct submissions, personal deputations and private briefings, or indirect representation, such as through the ACTU or the extensive network of education alliances or research ‘think tanks’ which the Union patronises. The Union’s political negotiations and public advocacy are carried out by the federal officers, and the public voice of the Union, in most matters is authorised by the Federal president, generally in person. The Union, however, also relies heavily on decentralising its strategies. This involves the branches and their rank and file in mounting public campaigns on preferred education issues. This campaigning aims to raise both the membership’s consciousness and public and electoral opinion. The Union’s ‘National Campaign’ focuses both on industrial issues that are outside the confines of industrial regulation, and federal funding issues which are the mortar in the Union’s championing of the cause of public education. The latter campaigns are developed by the Union as a lengthy, often complex overture to a federal election. The Union sees this as the nec-
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essary prerequisite for its involvement in elections because the Union is not affiliated with the Labor Party. The Union’s independence from the Australian political party system allows it the freedom to adopt any political stance during an election. Until the last three federal elections the Union and its predecessor avoided overt partisan intervention because not all branches supported intervention, believing that such action would undermine the Union’s claim to be a non-party political organisation. Electoral intervention, however, is not completely foreign to teacher unionism in Australia. State bodies have occasionally dabbled in it during a ‘crisis period’ of their histories and then generally to oppose an unpopular government. But the Victorian and New South Wales unions have more than ‘dabbled in’ electoral intervention in recent years and it also has become part of the collective political consciousness of the federal union (Spaull & Hince, 1986, pp. 87–90). The Union’s electoral intervention to help ‘save’ or ‘defeat’ a national government has become a central part of its strategies in the political arena.
The political wilderness After the Federation abandoned its attempt to obtain federal awards in the 1930s, it functioned only as a small national pressure group in education. It remained on the political margins, ignored as it was by all federal governments and the ministerial council (the Australian Education Council) until the late 1960s. Then the Federation’s clamour for the urgent need for federal financial intervention to ease the resourcing crisis in state education systems began to resonate with both major political parties in Canberra. The Whitlam Labor Government’s establishment of the Australian Schools Commission in 1973 provided the opportunity for the Federation to become a partner, among many, in the formulation of new national policies in school education and, more importantly, in the decision making related to Commonwealth financial support to the states’ school systems. This was recognisable in its representation of teachers’ interests in national or interstate educational bodies and ad hoc policy groups. The Federation also enhanced its role by coordinating state affiliates’ co-sponsored submissions and deputations to federal government departments. There was also an increase in Federation publicity, especially in election years, which were frequent, and the annual pre-Budget discussions on educational expenditures.
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The Whitlam Government’s settlement of the state aid issue created two major dilemmas for the Federation. The first was an internal one: not all affiliates were prepared to endorse the Federation’s acceptance of the settlement, and this internal unease became more pronounced in later years after the High Court in 1981 found that Commonwealth financial assistance to non-government schools did not violate the Constitution’s separation of Church and State powers as found in Section 116. The second dilemma was that Labor’s settlement of aid to non-government schools was exploited later by the Fraser Government to increase financial assistance to these schools at the expense of assistance to the state education systems. The Federation’s response to the Fraser Government’s education policies was to gradually withdraw from the collaborative role it had enjoyed with Commonwealth Ministers for Education of both persuasions in the 1970s. Though the Federation did not campaign against the Fraser government in the 1977 or 1980 federal elections, and was acknowledged for its even-handed manner in promoting the cause of state education, it did withdraw its nominee from the Schools Commission. In 1982 the Federation’s annual conference decided to oppose any new funding to non-government schools. It was also instrumental in creating the National Council on Public Education. Through both the ACTU and this ad hoc ‘lobby’ group it was able to secure a commitment from the Labor Party that when it returned to office it would revive as party platform that the primary responsibility of the Commonwealth in education would be to the state education systems. Nevertheless, as the Federation’s ‘no state aid’ policy remained on its books, it had to agonise over whether it would support the ALP at the 1983 election. The final resolution was worded ‘to oppose the unsatisfactory educational policies and practices of the government and support those aspects of ALP policy which constitute its greater commitment to public education’. The Federation ‘donated’ $154 000 to its own national publicity campaign, not to the ALP, but the direction of this campaign changed dramatically in the sudden announcement of an early election in 1983. In a brilliantly conceived national media campaign which started with ‘Our Children Need to win this election’, the Federation emphasised both the need to restore funding levels to public education and the need for a youth policy to raise school retention rates and create labour market programs for unemployed youth. The campaign was able to add something to the community’s growing impatience with ‘the do nothing’ government as well as helped create the sense of
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excitement that a new Labor government under Bob Hawke could redress the economic and social problems of the early 1980s. On election night, 5 March 1983, the Federation found that it had backed the winning party (Report on ATF campaign to ATF Executive, 5 March 1983, ATF Public Education Campaigns file).
The Federation/Union and the Hawke Governments After the surprise, indeed the euphoria, of the success of its national campaign and the actual election outcome, the Federation waited for its rewards from the new government. The Federation was sufficiently bold to tell the new Prime Minister that it should appoint Senator Susan Ryan as the Minister for Education; whether it influenced her actual appointment to the portfolio is questionable, but for a short time the Federation claimed the former school teacher and executive officer of the national state schools organisation as its own (ATF Executive meeting, 20–21 June 1983, ATF Executive Minutes). The Federation also returned to a seat on the Schools Commission with its nomination Van Davy being accepted by Ryan. Later, however, Senator Ryan refused to be bullied by the Federation when it claimed that it should vet all other appointments to the Schools Commission. Van Davy’s initial appointment to the Schools Commission was a signal to the Federation’s affiliates to bicker over how specifically he must represent the Federation’s policy on state aid. When he could not support its total opposition to state aid to non-government schools, he was criticised mercilessly by some in the Federation’s leadership and especially from his own state affiliate of New South Wales. The problem was not with Van Davy’s performance on the Schools Commission, but with the Federation’s 1982 policy which no modern Australian government could accept. The Federation had to admit that it had made a tactical mistake in the dogmatic approach it had taken to funding policy; this took time and energy but it obtained a more relaxed attitude to the issue in October 1983 (ATF Executive meeting, 11–13 Oct 1983, ATF Executive Minutes). This reconciliation of the Federation’s platform with the government’s attitudes to school funding produced dire warnings from opponents of state aid in the Federation, mainly from the NSWTF, that
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Labor in power would also renege on its overall commitment to public education. As it transpired, the NSWTF’s warnings were correct. The first Hawke government did little substantially to unravel the funding mess in schooling and the increasing bias of assistance towards independent and Roman Catholic schools remained in place. Consequently the Federation cooled quickly in its enthusiasm for the government (ATF special Executive meeting, 5 Sept 1984, ATF Executive Minutes). In contrast to the 1983 election, the national body and affiliates ran prosaic campaigns during the 1984 election. Federation officers had to counter affiliate pressures to run an antigovernment (anti-Labor) campaign, which would have been counterproductive, given the almost universal agreement that Labor would be returned to office. In the end, the Federation mounted a tame, unconvincing approach to the election, which due to its long duration forced public education issues to recede into the background (ATF Executive meeting, 19–21 Sept 1984, ATF Executive Minutes). In January 1985 the Federation’s annual conference decided to protest against the broken promises of the Hawke government to lift Commonwealth recurrent funding of state education systems. Its protest was bannered in the newspapers ‘Teachers declare war on Hawke’ (Australian, 8 May 1985). The relationship would deteriorate even further as the Federation had to submit to the ACTU/Labor government Prices and Income Accord which came to be seen by teacher unions and others as a blatant attempt at wage restraint in the public sectors. Subsequently the Federation’s voice in national education issues became almost inaudible. In order to revive the Federation’s status and energies the executive decided to change its tactical basis of national education campaigns by moving to a more managerial and professional approach in the conduct of campaigns. It opted to rely on professional research advice in developing its campaigns and its targets (including public relations’ work), while at the same time integrating the affiliates’ participation in any national activity rather than imposing additional duties on them. Moreover, the Federation stepped back from its earlier strategy of developing public interest alliances, in favour of positioning itself in the intellectual debates on education (Bluer, 1990, pp. 12–13). These new Federation tactics emerged in early 1987, but they were deflected by the decision of the Victorian affiliates to engage in their own disruptive industrial action over state issues and by the NSWTF’s decision not to participate in a national television advertising campaign. The public campaign, titled ‘The Education Partnership’, fell into disarray because of the internal discord in the Federation when the
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federal election of July 1987 was called. This was to be an election in which the Labor government seemed most vulnerable, and it remained vulnerable until the ‘Joh (Bjelke Petersen) for Canberra’ campaign destroyed the chances of John Howard winning the election for the Coalition parties. Within the Federation executive there was a serious ambivalence over the role the Federation should play in the election. Labor had squandered most of its goodwill among teacher activists, while the return of a conservative government seemed harmless enough on paper. This latter view was not shared by general secretary Bluer and a minority group who warned that Howard’s anti-trade union policies and his plans to reduce the influence of the federal industrial relations commission, as well as the fact that the ACTU was mobilised to support the Hawke government, meant that the Federation should also support the return of Labor. The Federation’s executive, however, was not persuaded and instead opted to ask the affiliates to join in a campaign which at best only opposed the education policies of the Coalition (ATF Executive meeting, June 1986). The 1987 elections interrupted the Federation’s implementation of its National Campaign for Public Education. The campaign, which had as its basic objective the raising of public support for the work of state schools and their teachers, had already been weakened by internal differences over the media content and its direction. The national campaign proceeded despite these difficulties and it eventually reached a wide audience through its imaginative television commercials. Nevertheless, there was growing awareness among Federation leaders that the Federation’s basic strategy over the last decade of funding and organising national campaigns to protect and promote public education had been of limited value. The fact that the Federation had not continued its electoral intervention after the 1983 election was, in the words of Bluer, because of ‘a profound sulk’ with Labor’s education policies and its lack of response to the claims of the Federation (General Secretary’s Report for 1987, p. 15). At times the Federation’s frustration was with the government, and not necessarily the Minister, but at other times, when it was convenient, the Federation recognised Labor’s efforts on behalf of public education. Thus Bluer wrote to Senator Ryan after she was replaced as Education Minister by John Dawkins. You would understand that we were unhappy with a number of the decisions made by the Government since March 1983 but we certainly recognise the role you played in attempting to ensure a substantial role for the Commonwealth Government in schools education. Some of the
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Unlike Ryan, Dawkins was captive to no one except his own ambitions, which he would later realise as Commonwealth Treasurer. He had been shadow Minister for Education (1980–83) when, with his policy adviser nearby (Ray Costello), he had made the strongest utterances that a Labor government would end the Commonwealth’s subsidy of the advantaged, well resourced private schools and increase generously assistance to the state education systems (Dawkins & Costello, 1993.) As Minister for Finance and in charge of reform of the public service, Dawkins was one of the first ministers to embrace economic rationalism and the power of the market. Thus, he was the chief opponent of Ryan’s attempts to introduce justice and equity principles into school funding. He would later apply these market principles to a restructuring of the workforce as the Minister for Trade who commissioned the Australian Reconstructed tour of Europe. As the new Minister for Employment, Education and Training, he was instrumental in linking education to economic policy, at least in relation to employment and training. Admired by Labor leaders Hawke and Keating, Dawkins was widely recognised as one of Labor’s ‘leading modernisers and rationalisers’ of the Labor decade (Preston, 1996, p. 163). He had also remembered from his early observations of the public service in Canberra that leadership was about exercising ministerial power over his senior members in the department, not rule by commissions comprised of vested interests. Therefore, in developing a Commonwealth-led national agenda in education, Dawkins was eager to abolish or restructure the various education commissions and replace their type of leadership with ministerial leadership vested in a mega-department of Employment, Education and Training. The new National Board of Employment, Education and Training (NBEET), which was largely a peace offering to the ACTU, was to have only
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advisory functions to the minister, and in turn it would take advice from its four councils, Employment and Skills Formation, Higher Education, Schools and the Australian Research Council, or from special investigatory committees. All of these, some observed, ‘no longer represented’ stakeholders’ (Morrow, Blackburn & Gill, 1998, p. 10). The Federation soon found that the new minister had a mind of his own and he was not going to be bullied into making promises on funding that could not be met by the Commonwealth’s tight fiscal strategies (ATF meeting with J. Dawkins, 29 July 1987, Ministerial Correspondence file). As well, he was not persuaded that the teacher unions should have any mandated capacity to influence outcomes or to set the agenda on bodies like the new Schools Council (ATF Action Circular, 15 Oct 1987). Dawkins was not interested in creating a national educational partnership between teacher unions and his bureaucrats and advisory bodies, rather he would acknowledge the new players in the power game, especially the ACTU. Thus, the ACTU was given two seats on NBEET, including Bluer who had resigned as ATF general secretary, while teacher unions would be represented on the Schools Council but as nominees of the ACTU. The Federation was not overly concerned about Dawkins’ structural reforms because it believed that in his direct linking of education and training with economic policy the Union would be better able to prosecute in national arenas the professional and industrial issues concerning teachers. Moreover, Dawkins’ approach would encourage the teachers to transform the Federation into a single Union. Finally, Dawkins’ changes to the policy advisory bodies would not deny the Federation an effective voice in them because its vastly improved relationship with the ACTU would ensure that its representational role on education would be provided by the Teachers Federation. And the Union’s leaders in the schools and TAFE sectors were appointed to NBEET’s sectoral councils. Nevertheless, despite the Federation’s outward bravado of coping with the Dawkins’ ‘revolution in education’ (the core of which was his transformation of higher education), most teacher union leaders came to the conclusion that Dawkins was a threat to school education because he was ‘too much of an economic rationalist, impatient with the concerns and shibboleths of teachers, especially their unions’ (Bluer, 1990, p. 19). Dawkins announced his blueprint for national school reform in May 1988 in his generative text Strengthening Australian Schools. In it, and subsequent discussions with the AEC, it became apparent that the Labor government intended to link Australian schools more directly to the needs of the post-industrial economy, ‘but preserve some sem-
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blance of equity and fairness in schooling policies because that was part of Labor’s traditions’ (Lingard, Porter, Bartlett, & Knight, 1993, p. 232). But unlike ‘old Labor’ who relied on Commonwealth intervention, Labor’s new blueprint was to rely on a national approach based on real collaboration between the Commonwealth and the states (Lingard et al., 1993). This approach was to become the operational basis for the development of national curriculum by the AEC, in which the teacher unions were only marginally involved (Marsh, 1995; Clements, 1996); for the reform of vocational training, which became a valuable example of ‘cooperative federalism’ and in which the Union’s TAFE division was a recognised stakeholder; and for the ‘quality of teaching movement’ in which the teacher unions became key and, at times, dominant participants. Strengthening Australia’s Schools was at pains to acknowledge that the delivery of quality schooling to Australians depended largely on improving the quality of teaching provided by classroom teachers. As seen in Chapter 5, the quality of teaching movement formed the basis of the teacher unions’ convergence of industrial and professional issues into their award restructuring campaigns. But the unions were conscious from the start of their campaigns that their efforts to create new industrial awards would not completely address the complex issues relating to the organisation of teachers’ work in the classroom. Other strategies outside the industrial systems had to be found to improve this aspect of school teaching. The Federation used its place on the new Schools Council to help produce a discussion paper on teacher quality, which was published as Teacher Quality in November 1989. The paper stressed the centrality of continuous professional development of teachers from pre-service education to induction of new teachers, to on-the-job training through in-service education. Much of Teacher Quality’s ideas and proposals resonated with the ministerial council’s discussion on reforming teacher training. In 1990 the Schools Council established a working party to follow up on the discussion in Teacher Quality. The Federation/Union did not make a formal submission but provided extensive briefings to one of the working party’s members, Rosemary Richards of the ACTTF, and occasional briefings to David McRae, a Victorian education consultant who was commissioned to write the document (ATF Annual Conference 1991, Papers). On reading ‘Australia’s Teachers: An Agenda for the Next Decade’, it was pleased to find that its views on a teachers’ charter, a more explicit career structure, professional development and teacher appraisal were included in the paper, as were sen-
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sitive discussions on qualitative aspects of teachers’ work. But the paper also had some ‘old-fashioned’ approaches which perceived teachers’ work as being confined to the classroom and not to the school organisation itself and the education system to which the school belonged (B. Preston to ATF Conference 1991). The importance of ‘Australia’s Teachers’ was that Dawkins was able to use its contents and directions as a basis to intervene in the stalemate over award restructuring, which developed between the Union and the ministerial employers’ group, to find a new avenue for the formulation of quality teaching policies. In July 1990 Dawkins’ department announced a proposal for a new approach to the National Project on the Quality of Teaching which would: …provide a forum for co-operative developmental work on key policy and procedural issues designed to improve the quality of teaching across the nation ... it would not handle industrial negotiations nor matters properly dealt with in State industrial tribunals. (quoted in Angus, 1996, p. 133)
The Commonwealth chaired the project and serviced it from DEET but the main representatives on the governing body were the states employers body, non-government schools and nominees of the ACTU, the ITF and the ATU. The Union, which was suspicious of the project and feared that it would be another mechanism to reduce funding to the states, was told by the ACTU that they should participate in the project but not to expect to use it as a means to obtain substantial further funds to pay for award restructuring in state schools. The intervention by the ACTU against the Union mollified states’ concerns that the Union would use the project ‘to extract the maximum additional quantum of resources’ to support school restructuring (Angus, 1996, p. 134). The employers had a second victory when the governing board agreed to extend the focus of the project to include learning as well as teaching. Thus it became the National Project on the Quality of Teaching and Learning (NPQTL). The Union leadership endorsed the NPQTL in a joint statement with the ITF early in 1991 and in its report to annual conference it rationalised its involvement in the project in the following: The work of the National Project on the Quality of Teaching and Learning has the potential to affect the work of teachers and the learning of students right through Australia. It is obvious that the work of the Project must have, as its prime focus, the objective of improving the working and learning conditions of teachers and students. It is vitally important that teachers are aware of the existence and operation of the
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The Union’s conference agreed to contribute $40 000 per year for the three-year life of the project. During the first six months of its operation, the NQTL became an unusual educational site of employers, unionists and school systems representatives mapping out strategies to improve the quality of learning and teaching in schools. Negotiations were painfully slow before the governing board agreed to focus the project’s work on three initiatives that would be carried out by three NPQTL working parties. The National Schools Project (NSP) was a school improvement venture which, at the urging of the teacher unions, focused on the ways reorganisation of teachers’ work could influence improvements in student learning. One hundred and seventy pilot schools were involved in the initiative and attempted to demonstrate that student performance could be improved by various ways of modernising work organisation of teachers and others (NPQTL Draft Final Report 1993). This part of the project was informed by: academic advice on practice; sponsored visits from overseas experts and practitioners on school reform; overseas visits to Germany by six participating teachers; a DEET funded summer school for teachers which strengthened the NSP reform network of practitioners; and several studies of work organisation in schools and the regulatory barriers which impede school improvement ventures. While the Union and others on the governing board were quick to point out to the government that the NSP would take more than three years to show the positive relationship between changes in teachers’ work and student learning outcomes, the NSP had enough credibility as an initiative for the Union to convince the government that the spirit and direction of this NPQTL venture should be carried over to the National Schools Network (NSN). This joint teacher union and employer body, which became the site for local action research into school performance, is one of the best examples of the Union’s leadership in the contemporary school reform movement in Australia. At the centre of the NSN research findings was that changing classroom practices of teachers, the most difficult of the qualitative reform in teachers’ work, is the key factor in improving student learning outcomes. The second NPQTL initiative was to develop a competency framework for teaching to apply to the beginning teacher. This initiative was thrust on the project by the National Training Board which required
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statements on standards for all occupational groups. This was reinforced by a Premiers’ Conference decision in July 1991 which called on all regulated professions to develop national competency standards by the end of 1992, in time for the introduction of mutual recognition agreements in 1993. The NPQTL commissioned development work on whether competency-based standards could or should be applied to teaching and eventually the governing board agreed to prepare a nationally consistent framework for the recognition of teaching qualifications and professional standards based on beginning teachers’ competencies. The Union went along with this initiative so long as the NPQTL recognised that competency standards must reflect the rich complexity of teachers’ work. It also supported this initiative because it dovetailed into the NPQTL’s third initiative, a national teaching council. The teacher unions were concerned that during the late 1980s the move towards deregulation of labour markets had included arguments for loosening the control professionals or unions of professionals had over who could enter their particular profession. Teacher registration boards only existed in three states but in these boards and other employing authorities in schools, teachers, though not their unions, played a significant role in registration and/or initial employment processes. Conservative rhetoric generally, and in teacher education, claimed that teachers and their unions had too much influence in these decisions and that they made their decisions from an industrial perspective. This helped governments advance the argument for the introduction of flexibilities (and managerial prerogatives) into public sector and professional labour markets (see Australian Teacher, No. 28, 1991; No. 32, 1992). To do this in an emerging national teaching market, the arguments ran, a national professional body was required and not federal teacher unions purporting to represent teachers professionally. In response to this very real threat to teacher unionism, which governments endorsed in their plans for mutual recognition legislation, the teacher unions’ representatives on the Schools Council and in the early planning of the NPQTL worked to develop the concept of a national body representing the teaching profession, which would eventually be called the Australian Teaching Council (ATC). The proposed council would have two main functions, or so the Union hoped: responsibility for over-viewing the professional standards in teaching and the registration of all teachers in Australia. To assist it in the formulation of a national body, the unions persuaded the NPQTL to hold a national conference in May 1992 where over 200 participants in education discussed the working party’s
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options for achieving national consistency in the recognition of teachers’ qualifications and standards. The conference decided to establish a national teaching council. The remainder of the year was used by the NPQTL working party consulting with education and outside groups, including similar overseas teaching councils, on the possible structure and responsibilities of an Australian council. In developing the responsibilities, the planning work fell into an impasse because state employer representatives were unable to concede that a council comprised largely of school teachers, most with strong ties to the teacher unions, should determine for employers the professional requirements for entry into the state teaching services. Similarly, a handful of teacher unionists and others not involved in the planning queried what would be the eventual fate of the federal unions if a national council of teachers provided the new leadership of teachers. Such a council might create the organisational dichotomy between teachers’ professional and industrial issues, which the teacher union movement had successfully avoided in the past (Preston, 1995; Australian Teacher, No. 31, 1992). By late 1992 Dawkins’ personal involvement in school reform had begun to wane. The collaborative approach to national curriculummaking had almost grounded on a tide of state rights’ issues, while the Commonwealth’s own commitment to improvement in teaching had almost disappeared as it realised that the states and the teachers expected the federal government to provide the additional funding support. The NPQTL’s operations reflected the Commonwealth’s parsimony. Its own secretariat within DEET had been systematically reduced after 1991, two of the projects were wound up before their time, and Commonwealth officers were sympathetic to the claims of some states that the project was not producing anything or that it had become an expensive ‘plaything’ of the Union (Angus, 1996, pp. 139–40). There was also concern by the states that the 1992 Accord had allowed the ACTU to obtain the Commonwealth government’s agreement that the government would enter into special industrial arrangements with the teacher union to effect funding initiatives for schools in which the states would not be consulted.
‘Saving’ the Labor government The promise of a teaching accord by the Keating Government was an obvious ploy to keep teachers onside during an election year. And it was a muted signal that the Keating Government was in ‘deep trouble’
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in the national electorate. The problem for the government was the general question that haunted its election strategists: had the Keating Government earned the support of the Union (and the wider trade union movement)? The Union’s leadership, while it acknowledged Dawkins’ intervention on behalf of the teacher unions in the establishment of the NPQTL, also noted that since the start of the recession (1991) Dawkins had been a willing party in the government for reducing the level of real funds to the state school systems. The Union pointed out that the government’s own inquiries were ‘increasingly underlining the inadequacy’ of federal funding of schooling (Australian Teacher, No. 31, 1992). But worse, the Union felt that the Labor government did not wish to revive public education finances and that this has been exacerbated ‘...by the tendency of the ALP to kidnap Coalition policies so that the agenda is shifting to the right’ (Martin, paper to Federal Conference 1993, p. 1). The Labor government was fortunate that it did not have time to kidnap the Coalition’s latest policies which was contained in its leader’s (John Hewson) radical tax package. Following its early release, with its central proposal to introduce a Goods and Service Tax, and an increase in funds to private schools and parents while further reducing Commonwealth educational grants to the states, this tax package was quickly condemned by the Union’s 1992 Federal Conference. As the Union announced after the conference: The Coalition Education Policy was contained in the recent Goods and Services Tax Package. The proposals it contains have extremely serious implications for education, public education and teachers. It is in many ways a summary of all the attacks on Public Education over the last 20 years and it is opportune for us to respond by collecting all the rebuttals, and the positive alternatives we offer, into a single resource document. (ATF 1992 Federal Conference Papers)
Not as prominent in its post-conference literature to branches was the Federal Conference decision which attacked the Keating Government’s ‘free market’ approach to economic policy; this, the Union claimed, had seriously undermined the delivery of social services including education. ATU is of the view that unless the Federal Government adopts the forementioned policy stance, the economic recession, high levels of unemployment and running down of the public sector and manufacturing sector will continue. Furthermore, the failure by the Government to
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By the end of 1992 the Union was mounting a two-pronged attack. Within the confines of the ACTU it was demanding that its leadership convince the Labor government that its policies needed to be drastically revised so that workers and their families, including teachers, could obtain some relief from Labor’s restructuring of Australia’s economic institutions. The second prong, a much more public strategy, was an all-out exposure of the dangers of the Coalition’s ‘Fightback’ package to education funding, public education per se, teachers’ working conditions and their industrial rights. Both the Union’s booklet The Coalition Education Policy (December 1992) and the Australian Teacher (November 1992) offered lengthy commentaries on Hewson’s policies in education, public health and labour market deregulation. Most of the articles took for granted that Hewson would win office, that Labor had betrayed its natural constituents, but that ‘Fightback’ must be opposed and could be defeated. The Union’s critique of the Coalition’s ‘New Right’ radical agenda was aimed overtly at teachers, alerting them to the dangers of a change in government. But it was also used to massage the elected delegates who were to meet at the January 1993 Federal Conference so that they could make a critical decision on the Union’s type of intervention in the federal election. The editorial in the Australian Teacher for November 1992 was more explicit: Unfortunately, the Coalition’s answer to many of the wrong-headed prescriptions of the Labor Government is to offer even larger doses of the same economic rationalist poison. A more sophisticated electorate could therefore turn the old adage on its head and cause the Federal Coalition to lose the next election. (p. 5)
But would the federal conference be prepared to help develop ‘this more sophisticated’ electorate, which in turn would save the Keating Government? Direct electoral intervention in the form of partisan support by the Union had not been a normal characteristic of its political behaviour, even though it ‘successfully’ intervened in the 1983 election, and even though the Union had become enmeshed in the ACTU’s political operations. In the previous federal election (March 1990), the Labor Party sought a record fourth successive term of office under Prime Minister Hawke. But the economy had slowed and the effects of globalisation were cutting into all government expenditures, including school fund-
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ing. Labor was perceived as having abandoned its natural constituents as well as the welfare and services sectors. The Opposition parties, however, were in internal disarray, and Labor was making a new pitch to win ‘the Green’ vote in marginal seats. It had also given moral support and promised material assistance to the trade union movement’s claims for restructuring of industrial awards. This, when translated into state school teachers’ work, was an attempt within the existing labour market arrangements to improve the career paths of experienced teachers. The Union, however, would not be drawn into intervention. It adopted the practice of the past and called on the contestants to present their education pledges and proposed programs for federal government assistance to education. The Union refused to commit itself to any party; instead it mounted an uninspiring campaign to ‘support public education’ and improvements in teachers’ working conditions. ‘Education’ remained out of sight from the pollsters’ analyses of voters’ concerns. The Hawke Labor Party was returned to government. Elsewhere, the NSWTF had already mobilised against a state Coalition government. Having stood by as the Greiner Coalition Government succeeded a Labor government, it opposed the new government’s promise of school restructuring in 1989. In protests reminiscent of its role in the Vietnam anti-war movement, the NSWTF orchestrated mass rallies of teachers, parents and school students to warn the government of the reactionary character of its reforms. By late 1990 the NSWTF was convinced that it, with other trade unions and community groups, should attempt to bring down the Greiner Government. It unleashed its electoral forces during the 1991 state election in what became the finest political campaign it had ever staged in its 72 year history. Focused on 18 marginal seats in urban and regional New South Wales, the union, centrally and locally, saturated the voters with anti-government propaganda. In another first, it hired outside media consultants to prepare messages which argued that educational mistakes and failures of the government meant that the government itself had failed the people. Stories of ‘school problems’ flooded radio and newspapers in the marginal seats, while television and newspaper advertisements in Sydney and provincial areas reinforced the image of the collapse of public confidence in the new education policies. The more education was ‘talked up’, the more the government’s fortunes declined. The NSWTF’s intervention, and the sophistication of its campaign, when combined with other dissatisfied sections, nearly brought down
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the government. Greiner’s Coalition was returned to power only with the support of a handful of independents (NSWTF, Annual Report, 1991, pp. 36–8). Teacher power had moved to the ballot box. Having discovered what it believed to be a new source of teacher activism, the NSWTF went in search of new converts. It found a receptive vessel in the Union. The 1993 federal election was the first serious attempt in a decade by the Coalition parties to wrest power from Labor. The message for public schools systems and their teachers was that the Coalition’s ‘Fightback’ would impose genuine hardships on school funding, while their competitors, the non-government schools, would benefit from increased support to allow parents ‘proper choice’ in the education market (Connors, 1992). The Union and the state branches, which had voiced their opposition to the Coalition’s proposals for all of 1992, saw considerable virtue in the NSWTF’s call to arms to defeat ‘Fightback’. This time the strategy for intervention would be different; the NSWTF campaign would be adopted to rescue a government. The Union met with the Commonwealth Minister for Education Employment and Training before the election and secured guarantees for increased funds for professional development of teachers and disadvantaged program. Also, the new Prime Minister, Paul Keating, addressed the 1993 Federal Conference – the first time a Prime Minister had done so – where he gave added assurances that if re-elected Labor would extend Commonwealth-state partnership to improve the quality of public schooling. He also reminded the conference that he had recently enabled state teachers, like the Victorians who had lost their state awards under the Kennett Government’s labour reforms, to preserve their rights and conditions under the federal industrial commission. Outside observers, however, were not optimistic: In the lead-up to an election, rhetoric belonging to an earlier age will no doubt be revived to pacify the Labor ‘heartland’ and suitably frighten it of the conservative alternative. But whether re-elected or consigned to the Opposition benches, it is safe to assume that Labor will continue to espouse the social and economic priorities required by Australia’s incorporation into the structures and processes of the global market. The Australian Labor Party as presently constituted lacks the theoretical and organisational base, the incentive, policies of personalities needed to provide a catalyst for change. (Camilleri, 1993, p. 19)
The federal conference decided that although it could not give direct endorsement to the Labor Party, it could commit its energies to the
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defeat of the Coalition parties. It rationalised that because the ALP and the Democrats had superior policies to the Coalition in public education and industrial relations, the AEU would organise a national campaign to put the ‘Coalition Last’ in the election. Soon after, the ACTU asked the AEU to take sole responsibility for the education industry’s campaign against ‘Fightback’. In essence, the Union’s campaign became an election struggle to return Labor. The Union’s federal election committee organised a campaign around three principal audiences in the electorate: members of the public 20–35 years old (the youth vote and the young parents vote); student members in TAFE colleges; and school and TAFE teachers and their families. On advice from its branches, it selected 34 marginal seats (far too many, given the total of 147 House of Representatives seats) in which to mount its campaign from central and state funds, using on-the-ground teachers. In these seats, handouts and mail-outs, radios and newspaper ‘events’, and TV, radio and cinema commercials conveyed the message that the Coalition’s policies would seriously weaken the provision of public schooling in the states. It was the NSWTF’s 1991 campaign, writ large. The TAFE division handled the college student population, and at rock-band concerts it warned of the possible privatisation of vocational training, increased fees for TAFE students and the likelihood of a youth wage ($3 an hour) if the Coalition came to power. A third prong in the strategy was that the Union coordinated the non-government and higher education teacher unions to campaign against the industrial relations reforms intended for all education workers by the Coalition. By the end of the election the Union had spent at least $750 000 on its campaign and had distributed nearly 1.3 million pamphlets. Towards the end of the campaign, reports from the marginals indicated that education issues had risen in prominence in voters’ concerns. Previously they had only been interested in issues like health care, taxation, ‘economic management’ and the environment. At the same time, Keating had begun to dramatically reduce the gap between Labor and the Opposition in the public opinion polls. Of course, the Union’s strategy was not without its opponents among and within the branches. A number of small branches and individuals complained that the Union had become overtly partisan. This was answered with ‘the official line’ that, although the Union had to defend the teachers and schools from ‘Fightback’ proposals, there was still a choice of parties available to members – Labor, the Democrats or independents.
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Ultimately the Coalition lost the election, as the electorate refused to endorse its radical plan for market reform of the Australian economy. It is difficult to assess the Union’s impact on this surprise result. At a sophisticated level of election analysis its campaign does not rate a mention, nor does ‘education’ feature as a prominent issue (Bean, 1994). It was noted, however, that the Labor government projected its ‘education’ profile much closer to special constituents (presumably the AEU) than had occurred in the 1990 election. And as the Union reflected on this issue at the Federal Executive meeting in June: It goes without saying that the campaign in 1993 was successful in keeping the conservatives out of Government because of the potential effect on our members of changes to Medicare, IR laws, the introduction of the GST and other related policies rather than a desire to keep the Labor Party in power. Because of the nature of the campaign, public education was overshadowed by these justifiably important issues. It seems public education did not feature as a critical issue in the election. However with the conservative attacks on so many fronts (mainly due to the wide ranging effect of the GST) education was perceived along with health and other similar matters as ‘untouchable’ social justice issues essential to a society based on equity values and support for those not so well off.
The problem with national studies is that they do not refine their analysis to account for issues of voting swings in individual ‘marginal’ seats. Closer inspection of these seats might well support the AEU’s claims that its campaign did bite in many of its marginal seats. And while one would not be as effusive of the AEU’s impact as the Union itself, it would seem that of its 34 marginal seats, it had some pronounced influence in 13. This had two dimensions; government’s seats that were at risk, and those seats which changed hands to the Labor Party. Whatever the actual influence of the Union’s intervention, it could claim that, along with other trade unions and special constituents, it had helped Paul Keating snatch the 1993 election from the Coalition. This was also the impression gained from letters of gratitude to the AEU from local MPs, the ACTU and the ALP. As such, the Union’s leadership could rightly take its place at the ‘True Believers’ Dinner in Canberra in March 1993. But as Doug White noted afterwards: The defeat of the Liberals is marvellous. The defeat of economic rationalism, of the process of measuring everything in units of global currency,
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will take a bit longer. The ALP has roused hopes as well as building on fear. But there are few signs that it has any idea how to deliver the promises made. (White, 1993. p. 5)
The second Keating Government and the Union White’s observation was to become true for school education, though not for TAFE, although at first the Labor government endeavoured to honour its pre-election commitments to the Union. The new Minister, Kim Beazley, and the junior Minister for Schools, Ross Free, were not as skilful in handling the national agenda as Dawkins; Beazley might have been but he was more conservative politically than his predecessor, and more attracted to the ‘employment’ challenges in his new portfolio (Angus, 1996, p. 140). The Commonwealth’s political leaders in education needed to be particularly adept at handling the states because new non-Labor governments had recently come to office in Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia. Unlike the late 1980s, the state ministers for education wanted to approach school funding and collaborative education projects ‘with a minimalist national agenda’. Consequently, the non-Labor majority on the AEC refused to endorse the national curriculum statements, profiles and competencies at its July 1993 meeting. Instead they insisted that the states and territories should have the discretion to review and implement the findings of its curriculum and assessment committee (Marsh, 1995, pp. 154–9). The Union had been concerned about the project’s outcomes because of the lack of meaningful consultation with teacher unions and the possibility that the student assessment data obtained from the schools’ profiles would be used to monitor school systems’ performance. Nevertheless, it was dismayed by the collapse of the national curriculum project (Federal Executive meeting 17 June 1993, AEU Federal Executive Minutes; AEU media release, 3 July 1993). The Commonwealth minister, however, persisted with a ‘maximalist national agenda’ through a new agenda for improving teachers’ work, their professional standing and education by allocating in-service funds directly to state subject associations (Lingard, Porter, Bartlett, & Knight, 1995, p. 62). Thus the Commonwealth still partly funded the National Schools Network, established the Teaching Accord, the Australian Teaching Council and requested the Schools Council to review the level of recurrent funding of government primary schools. The Teaching Accord, launched in October 1993, was an agreement between the AEU, the ITF and the Commonwealth government to
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accommodate Labor’s election promise to develop a comprehensive framework agreement with teachers for implementing curriculum and vocational initiatives. The text outlined the priorities for developing and implementing a national education agenda which acknowledged ‘that teachers have a pivotal role in implementing change and that they should be involved in the development of policies and programs which lead to change’ (Teaching Accord Draft Report, Federal Executive Papers, 31 August 1994). Education priorities included Commonwealth financial support for school literacy studies, ‘middle school’ reform, post-compulsory education modernisation, a national professional development program for teachers (in-service) and national equity programs including Aboriginal education and girls’ education. The Teaching Accord, which mapped out the Commonwealth’s directions for new initiatives in schooling and vocational education, sought to empower the teachers in the implementation of these priorities and also recognised, for political purposes, the role of the AEU and the ITF in brokering this agreement. It was clever Labor government politics, but as it transpired, most of these proposed initiatives did not reach fruition. Some of these initiatives were to be housed in the Australian Teaching Council. The NPQTL’s work in developing this body had stalled before the election because state education employers were not convinced that its proposed registration functions were legitimate concerns for a council that would be dominated by teacher representatives. After the election several states firmed in their opposition to the ATC to effect a stalemate. Kim Beazley, in a rare Dawkins-style ‘crashthrough’ approach advised the unions and the ministerial council that he would establish the council with or without the support of the states (Beazley to Burrow, 7 June 1993, AEU file 56.43.7). The Commonwealth department then took over the planning and after extensive consultation with the teacher unions and other education groups established the ATC as an incorporated association in the ACT on 15 June 1993. Teachers registered for membership (though not in a dramatic number) and then voted for the 40 places on the ATC Board (30 for state school teachers) who sat with 25 nominees from federal and state governments, national parents and school council groups, the vice-chancellors’ association and the deans of education association. After some reluctance, five state governments nominated either representatives or observers to the board. Mary Kelly, the former QTU president and AEU vice-president, was appointed by the Commonwealth government to be first chairperson of the ATC.
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The Union acknowledged that ‘it had played a fundamental role in securing this national body’ (Burrow to X, 17 Nov 1993) and also insisted that state branches take care in finding teachers sympathetic to the Union’s ideals who would nominate for the board, and that they ensure that the Council was well placed to influence all areas of policy-setting and prepared ‘to carve out a position in the entire consultative framework’ in national education. By Union design or otherwise, key union leaders in the state branches found their way onto the Council’s main working parties. These working parties included: ‘membership’, concerned with issues of teacher quality, teacher eligibility and national registration; ‘strategic planning’; and the winter school. Probably the most visible of the ATC’s activities was the professional development programs for teachers organised as ‘schools’ jointly by the ATC and the Commonwealth-funded NSN’s National Professional Development Program. The ATC also took over from the defunct NPQTL the development of a national competency framework for beginning teachers which, with considerable input from the Australian Council of Deans of Education, established five areas of competence in teaching. This framework was launched in March 1996 and became fully operative the following year. The ATC also commissioned research into teachers’ views on their work and practices and what they wanted as professionals in the school systems. In a different vein, the ATC coordinated the Australian celebration for UNESCO’s International Teachers’ Day which was introduced in October 1995. On the contentious issue of national teacher registration, the ATC, in consultation with the unions and employing authorities, worked slowly towards adopting a draft set of standards for graduates to enter teaching. It was hoped that these ‘ATC standards’ would become requirements for eligibility to join the ATC so that membership of the council could eventually be equated with a licence to teach. This never occurred, but the ATC work on this issue generated sufficient interest to help keep state registration boards afloat in Queensland and Tasmania. It remains an active issue among most states today. In 1997 the Union criticised the ministerial council’s decision to exchange information on unsuitable teachers and called on it to establish a national teachers’ registration system (Executive Report to Federal Conference 1998, p. 10). Much of the remaining work of the ATC leadership group was geared to questions of financial viability and, eventually, survival. The fact that the ATC was always significantly short of its self-sufficiency target of 15 000 members meant that it had to go cap in hand to DEET
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to fund its operations. This was done out of the Labor government’s Quality Schooling Program. The change in government in March 1996 spelt the end of this program funding and despite the desperate lobbying of the Coalition before and after the election the Commonwealth government withdrew its support of the ATC in 1996 (ATC, The Council, Newsletters). Within the Teaching Accord, the Labor government carried out its promise to review ‘government primary school resourcing, with the involvement of the profession’. NBEET’s Schools Council was requested by Minister Beazley to conduct such a review of funding levels in this sector, taking into account the requirements for improved learning and literacy in the state primary schools. It was to examine the effectiveness of current funding levels and suggest how new resourcing models ‘could contribute towards maximising effectiveness, with a particular focus on literacy’. Two education researchers from the University of Melbourne were commissioned to carry out research into resourcing patterns and primary schooling effectiveness, as directed by a reference group which included a Union nomination. The report, ‘Improving Commonwealth Funding Arrangements for Government Primary Schools – Discussion paper’ (Dec 1994) was circulated to particular education groups, including the Union, with a view to preparing a brief of advice to the minister on new funding possibilities. The Union’s response was direct. There must be an immediate increase in Commonwealth funding to public schools, funding of primary school students should be equal to that of secondary school students and this increase should not be funded out of decreased allocation to the latter. The Commonwealth funding should be allocated to states under bilateral agreements allowing local flexibility but within certain priority targets. These included improvement in literacy levels, concentration on the early years of primary schooling and appropriate funding for teacher professional development. The Union also requested that parents associations and teacher unions be involved in the making of these agreements at the state level, as well as teacher union involvement in accountability mechanisms that would be developed in order to study the effect of the funding on literacy levels (Federal Conference 1995, Resolutions). Some of these programs were expanded but others, such as key competencies in learning, floundered because the states would not agree to a national framework for implementing Labor’s initiatives, or they refused to cooperate in a tripartite system which included the teacher unions, or
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they just wanted additional funds without direction. The Commonwealth government, in effect, surrendered to states’ rights and then squandered its national mandate by allowing the states to implement further cutbacks in public services. As if sensing the futility of inter-governmental cooperation, Prime Minister Keating concentrated, in his words, ‘on the Big Picture’. Thus, while idealists saw considerable virtue in his championing of native land rights, new international trade organisations, defence arrangements in Asia or the modernisation of the Australian Constitution, those who sought relief from the decline in living and working standards, or the cutbacks in public education funding, lost confidence in Labor’s capacity to deliver. But the Union, as part of its modernisation processes, had established the AEU Centre for Education and Training Futures late in 1994. Its chief objective was to take over management of the trade union training programs previously offered by TUTA and other training providers, but it was also established to initiate public activities and publications ‘relevant to public policy as it affects the education industry and broaden social issues’. Before the centre’s establishment, the Union itself had conducted its own seminars on ‘the future of public education’ theme, such as its training seminar in May 1994, or at its Federal Conference seminar on the same topic in January 1994. After this seminar, Federal Conference declared: ...in 1994 Public Education systems face a level of public, political and fiscal crisis which cannot be ignored. Commonwealth funds, as a percentage of State income, have progressively declined for a decade. State Governments have pursued cuts to public education portraying them as desirable and a sign of good government and right wing elements of the private sector, themselves responsible for presiding over declining economic standards, have pursued a relentless and indeed baseless attack on education standards. This must be replaced by a more rational evaluation if the strengths of our public systems are to continue to underpin, and indeed to play a major role in the creation of a stable future.
Throughout 1994, and particularly 1995, at its research officers’ meetings and the AEU Centre for Education and Training Futures’ sponsorship of workshops and research projects, the Union developed a vigorous critique of Australian governments’ abrogation of their duty to education. Part of the critique latched on to the Keating-generated debates about citizenship, constitutional reform and the possibility of an Australian republic. The Union argued that these changes could not be introduced without public education becoming the
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mortar of a new political culture. Therefore it proposed that public education be enshrined as a political right for all Australians, its funding protected by a constitutional guarantee. Sharan Burrow, opening the 1995 Federal conference, addressed the rise of child neglect in wealthy countries like Australia. This injustice could only be remedied, she said, with a massive re-investment in public schooling. Burrow concluded with the catch-cry: ‘a just republic: not just a republic, Mr Keating!’ Later the AEU published Creating an Education Nation (an adaptation in title of Labor’s seminal statements Working Nation and Creative Nation) which benchmarked the dramatic decline in Australia’s expenditure on school education, relative to other OECD nations’ expenditures. Of particular significance was its documentation, using the school council’s review, on the widening ‘primary school gap’ which the AEU forecast would require a national investment of $1billion dollars over five years to fund primary schools at the same level as secondary schools. Significantly, the AEU polled its members in all sectors and found that their priority was for increased federal funding of primary education (Hewett paper, Feb 1997, pp. 3–4, AEU Federal Executive Minutes). At the political level, the AEU forcefully promoted its ideas and solutions among the national parties, the parliamentary backbenchers and candidates for federal office. But ever so subtly the Union positioned itself away from the Labor government. This was both indicative of its perception of Labor’s inaction, and its concern over the decline in Labor’s popularity in opinion polls. During 1994 the AEU leadership had been impressed first-hand with the American Federation of Teachers’ public appraisals of New York legislators’ records on public education. The AEU promised that it too would ‘Americanise’ its campaigning by closely monitoring the educational commitments of MPs in key federal seats (Federal Executive meeting 7–8 June 1995, item 3.3). By this process it introduced the notion of a ‘preferred candidates’ database for the 1996 election. In effect, the AEU was engaging in political brinkmanship. Its objective was to extract a new level of financial commitment from the Labor government by exposing the vulnerability of its backbenchers in marginal seats. If the Union had hoped for a positive response from the Prime Minister, it was to be disappointed. Keating’s message to the 1996 annual conference (on the eve of the election) played on the dangers to schools and teachers if a Coalition government were elected. The pop-
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ular impression of the Union’s response to Keating’s visit was that he addressed only the converted (Age, 20 Jan 1996). The subsequent debate on the Union’s stance for the election noted this perception of the AEU’s fidelity to Labor and the conference went to some lengths to suggest that the Labor Party could not automatically depend on its indirect support. The dilemma facing the Union was explained by the Deputy Federal Secretary: Some will want to take short-cuts and think that we should say nothing critical of Labor in the election context – save up our arguments till later. If that is the case, we might as well hand our money over to the ALP and sit back. Apart from the fact that I think much of the ALP’s campaign has been phoney and focussing on the wrong issues, such a course would be bad both tactically and practically. I am not arguing for some airy-fairy, ideologically pure position, but actions that will place us in the best possible position post the election whoever wins. After all, we would have to deal with the Coalition if they win. At least if we’ve run an independent campaign in which we’ve been critical of Labor as well, they can’t beat us about the head with the charge that we’re just part of the Labor machine. And above all, I believe this is what our members want and this should be the basis of whatever we do. (Richard Walsham, Some Thoughts on our Federal Election Strategy, p. 2, AEU file 1.37.3)
But in the heat of the campaign the AEU was forced to draw on its 1993 strategy. It called on the public to ‘Put the Coalition Last’. This was despite the absence of any last minute assurances from the government of a higher commitment to education. Indeed, the AEU had to concede that only the Democrats’ platform was sympathetic to its own policies and arguments. A special effort was mounted to provide additional aid to the party in its bid to capture six Senate seats. The AEU persisted with its strategy to confer preferred candidates status on candidates in 35 marginal seats. All Labor candidates in these seats received the Union’s blessing, as did a number of candidates for the smaller parties. No Coalition candidates received AEU endorsement. The campaign proceeded in the marginal seats on much the same lines and style as the 1993 election. Although ‘Education is the Window of Opportunity’ billboards dominated local landscapes, the grassroots electioneering lacked the vigour of the previous election. It also lacked focus or even desperation as Labor’s national campaign failed to respond to the Coalition’s simple message: ‘It’s Time for Change’. Unlike 1993, there were serious local distractions; three state branches continued to focus on their disputes with employers over state issues. Nevertheless, a list of electors’ concerns shows that the
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number of voters who said ‘education issues’ was a concern that influenced their voting ‘clearly increased’ compared with the 1993 election, which suggests that Union’s campaign did have some impact in the marginal electorates (Bean, 1997, pp. 196–8). At the election, the AEU failed to impede the rush towards the Coalition. A 5 per cent swing against Labor saw it lose 30 seats. Its appeal, like that of the AEU, to the youth vote, young families and working-class supporters in urban and provincial seats, was substantially rejected. Labor’s campaign strategy did not assist the cause. As the opinion pollster Rod Cameron noted after the election: The Labor agenda in the last twelve months was about Mabo, Carmen Lawrence, an obscure bridge in South Australia, Asian Migration and also a republic. It wasn’t about anything of interest to the middle ground. (quoted in Williams, 1997, p. 330)
In New South Wales and Queensland, 14 of the 15 ‘AEU marginals’ went to the Coalition, while in Victoria, which resisted the anti-Labor swing nationally, all six ‘AEU marginals’ were taken or held by the Liberal Party. A local survey of the Union’s marginal seats in southeast Queensland found that not only did blue-collar workers turn against Labor, but low income white-collar workers, who it is often assumed are attracted to campaigns which support public education, also rejected Labor (Singleton, Martyn, & Ward, 1998). In the Senate elections the AEU’s special effort may have had a slight influence on the Democrats’ results. The Democrats increased its vote by about 6 per cent, enough to secure a seat in five states. But in Tasmania, where the AEU’s Senate effort was pronounced, the Democrat incumbent was defeated. The Democrats, Greens and Independents still held the balance of power in the Senate, but they found it difficult to resist the new government’s ‘huge mandate for change’ argument in their voting on major legislation. The AEU’s role in the 1996 election must be seen as an ineffective intervention. But it is difficult to mount a serious criticism of its strategy or impact when it is now obvious after the event that nothing was going to save the Labor government, least of all the Union. The 1996 election highlighted the modern dilemma for teacher activism: whether unions should intervene when the odds against success are so high. Intervention is always going to be an adventure in volatile electorates. ‘To intervene or not’ is to invite dissension from within, especially when ‘middle-class’ teachers harbour a range of partisan loyalties. Intervention is also a gamble when it becomes
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entrenched as a tactic. If a union’s behaviour becomes predictable at the very time when surprise and enterprise are required, then intervention soon becomes impotence. This was soon to be tested in the 1998 election.
Union records consulted ATF Public Education Campaigns 1980–86, NBA Z 219, Boxes 118 & 198 Ministerial Correspondence etc, 1984–88, NBA Z 219, Boxes 149–50; 1989–AEU file 18.1.1, 18.1.3 (Teaching Accord) Federal Elections Campaigns: 1990, NBA Z 219, Box 190 and AEU file 65.9.2; 1993, file 65.9.3; 1996 files 1.37.3; 65.9.3 Australian Teaching Council, AEU files 18.140.1; 56.43.7 National Project Quality Teaching & Learning, files 56.43.1 to 56.48.1 Sharan Burrow Witness Statement to AIRC Hearing, South Australia, AEU Exhibit 53, 24 August 1995
7 The Howard Government and the Union ... the substance of Howard’s strategy involves a direct attack on the industrial relations system. In order to bring about a regime of individual contracting it is necessary to both de-collectivise and de-regulate the system. In other words to destroy union bargaining power and to undermine the system of industrial award regulation. Graham Smith, Law Lecturer, ‘Howard’s Way’, Law seminar, April 1991
Introduction On election night, 3 March 1996, the new Prime Minister John Howard promised to govern for all, with fairness and understanding. Within days it became apparent that this meant only for ‘some’, and that retribution against the various constituent members of the labour movement would be central to the new government’s political agenda. For the Union, along with the other unions in the education industry, there were to be no concessions as the Coalition government believed them ‘very tied’ to Labor (Age, 4 March 1996), even though they had shown in the period after 1993 that they were ‘not too pleased’ with the Keating Government (Prosser & Starr, p. 117). During the election the Coalition had promised that school teachers would continue to be part of any national partnerships in education and that ‘close and real consultation with the major stakeholders in education’ will be the distinguishing feature of a Coalition government’ (quoted in Preston, 1997, p. 89). But in practice this promise had 148
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to be set against the ‘realpolitik’ of conservative power, that modern Liberal governments in Australia were unashamedly anti-trade unionism. In its mildest expression this meant that conservative governments were determined to reduce the influence of trade unions on government policy making, especially by eroding ‘the consultative arrangements’ which 13 years of Labor governments had enshrined in national politics (Prosser & Starr, 1997, p. 123). The Union knew from its branches’ experience under the Kennett and Court Governments that the marginalisation of teacher unions was not only ideological, but also a key strategic component of radical school reform. Dressed up as ‘public choice’ theory in the economic rationalists’ creed, these governments argued that teachers and their unions had ‘captured’ schools to the disadvantage of consumers and taxpayers. Therefore teachers, like other professionals in the public services, could not be trusted to deliver efficiently the services provided by the state (Preston, 1997, pp. 90–1). In Victoria’s case, the corporatisation of the state schools market through the Schools of the Future project meant that the state government systematically removed the teacher unions, entrenched bureaucrats and anyone else who might stand in the way of its reform implementation (Spaull, 1999). The same process was found in its radical reform of the teaching labour market; unions were not to be systematically involved in collective bargaining or the making of individual contracts of employment. The Howard Government, influenced by the same market ideology and by the success of its applications in Victoria and Western Australia, slavishly followed this approach in its reform of the federal industrial relations system and its reform of public education funding and other changes in the national agendas for schooling and vocational education and training.
Surviving the Workplace Relations Act John Howard is one of the most conservative politicians in modern national politics in Australia. Howard, because of his ‘invincible determination’, as journalists call it, has risen from nearly two decades of prominence in Liberal Party politics to the ultimate office – Prime Minister of Australia. Since the early 1980s, Howard has been a champion of taxation reform and the radical restructuring of centralised industrial relations systems. As observed in 1991, Howard was ‘a man with an almost missionary zeal’ in his ideological advocacy of indi-
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vidual employment contracts to replace industrial awards, the drastic reduction of the AIRC’s powers of arbitration and the elimination of union power in industrial negotiations. The Union was aware of Howard’s agenda and that of the Liberal Party’s policy regarding state school teachers. Part of this policy stated that: …the centralised industrial relations arrangements have failed to provide suitable employment conditions for teachers and have eroded the authority of principals and the quality of the school environment.
Both ‘Howard’s Way’ and the Liberal Party policies formed the basis of the Union’s 1991 Federal Conference debate on the conservative attack on teachers (ATF Federal Conference 1991, Papers). But the practical demonstrations of these policies in action were rammed home to teachers after the Liberal Party captured power in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. The Union needed little urging from the ACTU to campaign against the Coalition parties in the 1993 federal election because of their anti-teacher union policies. The same was true of the Union in the 1996 election, even though Peter Reith, the shadow minister for industrial relations, had softened Howard’s earlier positions when he was shadow minister so that the Liberal’s new election policy did not appear totally ‘anti worker’ (Williams, 1997, p. 166). After Howard’s victory in March 1996 the Union was certain that the fate of federal awards in the education industry was in grave jeopardy. The Minister for Industrial Relations, Peter Reith, told the AEU soon after the election that he believed market forces, not regulation, should determine teachers’ wages and conditions ‘and if salary differentials resulted he [Reith] would not be worried’ (Australian Educator, Winter, 1996). In the area of federal regulation of state school teachers’ conditions, the Howard Government declared its position in its first few months of office. It did this by supporting Western Australia and South Australia in their appeal against Mr Justice Munro’s decision for the AIRC and not the state commissions to arbitrate on teachers’ employment conditions (see Chapter 5). The new federal government intervened in the states’ appeal to the Full Bench, arguing that the state tribunals in South Australia and Western Australia were capable of dealing with teachers’ disputes. It argued also that in the public interest the AIRC should consider that new federal industrial relations arrangements were anticipated in the government’s proposed reform of the industrial relations system. The Full Bench merely noted the
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Commonwealth’s submissions and treated them as supporting the states’ appeals. It then rejected them to find that Mr Justice Munro had not committed any errors in the exercise of his discretion or establishing jurisdiction, nor in his interpretation of the operations of the state industrial commissions (AIRC Print N9074). In May 1996, the Howard Government introduced its Workplace Relations Bill into the Commonwealth Parliament in order to effect its radical reform of the federal industrial relations system; moving it away from third party intervention, to employer/employee bargaining at the workplace. Although the press hailed the bill as a ‘Workplace Revolution’ (Australian, 24 May 1966), the government and others saw it as an evolutionary change in the conduct of industrial relations in Australia. Among a raft of changes, the Workplace Relations Bill established a new institutional framework that would encourage the growth of individual contracts, in the guise of Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs); reduce the arbitration powers of the AIRC and the industrial matters which it could rule on; reduce the impact of federal awards by restoring the paramountcy of state industrial agreements over federal awards; and encourage competition between trade unions. Before the bill was debated it was referred to the Senate’s Economics Reference Committee, which conducted a public investigation into the implications of the proposed legislation. The AEU’s federal office tendered a submission to the committee and voiced the teacher unions’ concerns at an open hearing. The AEU opposed the proposed restrictions on the AIRC’s arbitration powers and the threatened return to state employment agreements in Victoria and elsewhere. To illustrate its arguments, it drew heavily on the Victorian experience of federal awards relating to teachers’ redundancies and workloads to emphasise the vital role of federal arbitration in teacher disputes. It also reminded the Senate inquiry that its basic problem with the states during the 1990s was that the governments who had introduced legislative reforms in the industrial relations area were also the employers of teachers (AEU Submission 1996, p. 2), and concluded: The bill proceeds on the premise that employers are always willing to negotiate in good faith and are always achievable... Unfortunately, the AEU’s experience is that this is not always the case, particularly in a sector which is increasingly subject to blinkered-driven policies. (p. 28)
The Senate inquiry produced three partisan reports, the most significant one being from the Democrats (as it held the balance of power in
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the Senate) which indicated that the party had serious reservations about many of the bill’s provisions. During the March 1996 federal election when the AEU had given electoral support to both the ALP and the Democrats, the Union had developed a new affinity with the Democrats and its education policies. It called on this relationship during the critical period when the Democrats and the Coalition government negotiated a series of amendments to the bill – to be called ‘The Agreement’ – before the Democrats would consent to pass the legislation in the Senate. The AEU, acting on the ACTU’s direction, brought pressure to bear on the Democrats to preserve paid rates provisions in awards rather than adopt minimum rates of pay as proposed in the bill which, if effected, could have resulted in a reduction of the annual salaries of many teachers, nurses and others who had received annual incremental salary increases based on years of service. At the same time, the AEU helped to persuade the Democrats to increase the range of industrial matters (now known under the Workplace Relations Act 1996 as ‘allowable award matters’) which could be arbitrated by the AIRC. Finally, the Union helped convince the Democrats that state agreements should not displace federal awards, unless a state industrial authority is satisfied that state agreement was made without employer duress and that any agreement does not disadvantage employees in their award entitlements. After the Democrats and the government reached ‘The Agreement’, but before the Senate vote, the Victorian government announced that it was prepared to cede most of its industrial relations powers to the Commonwealth Parliament under Victoria’s Commonwealth Powers (Industrial Relations) Act 1996. The decision, which was seen as the end of the Victorian experiment in radical labour market deregulation, was the local culmination of right-wing industrial relations reform philosophy which had advocated the creation of a national, rather than federal, approach to Australian industrial relations. The Victorian reference was accepted by the Howard Government and it now forms part XV of the Workplace Relations Act (WRA) 1996. This transfer of powers brought Victorian teachers and other state education workers directly into a national jurisdiction without the constitutional restrictions that apply to the other states. Whereas in the other states (but not the ACT and NT) AWAs cannot be made with state school teachers because government schools are not regarded as ‘constitutional corporations’, Victorian teachers and the DOE can enter into individual employment contracts, providing both choose the
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AWA option. In 1998 the Victorian government declared that individual contracts in schools would be used in all self-governing schools. Several other tests of the WRA’s reach have also emerged. The Act under s. 127 gave the AIRC power to declare strikes illegal outside a period of collective bargaining. These powers were tested for the first time in the public sector in the Victorian ‘Scrap the LAP’ dispute in March 1997. The LAP, the Learning Assessment Project, is a system of standardised testing of pupils in Grades 3 and 5 in Victorian state primary schools. In 1997 the Minister for Education applied to the AIRC for a s.127 order to prevent teachers from refusing to conduct the tests in their classrooms. The AIRC rejected the AEU’s argument that industrial action by teachers was permissible because at the time the LAPs were to occur the Union and the DOE were about to enter a bargaining period for a salary and conditions claim. The commission found that no bargaining period existed, that this matter had been part of the increased workload recognised in the 1996 salaries award, and that the Union’s LAP dispute was part of its education campaign against government policy and not directly associated with the campaign to seek a new industrial agreement or a negotiation framework (AIRC Print L3637). The AIRC subsequently suspended the official bargaining period and directed teachers not to take industrial action over the LAP issue. In another area, the Victorian teachers’ ability to access the AIRC’s award-making regulation is now limited by the objectives of the new Act, particularly by its ‘allowable award matters’ that restrict teachers’ access to arbitration on a wide range of terms and conditions. For some years the AEU has been seeking AIRC endorsement of its policy that teachers should be part of elected members of school panels on initial appointments, transfers and promotions. It believed it was close to success before the advent of the WRA. In 1996 it asked that this be provided under the award provisions of the Industrial Relations Act 1988. In a threshold decision the AIRC ruled that the provisions of WRA would apply to the AEU’s application. In April 1998 a Full Bench refused to incorporate selection panels with Union involvement or elected staff in the initial appointment of teachers, special duties payments to individual teachers, performance review and transfers and promotions. The Unions’ involvement in these selection processes before 1992 could not be continued under any new award because such matters were not regarded as ‘allowable’ under the new legislation. Moreover, the AIRC believed that the operational basis of teachers’ work in the Victorian state system, which
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denied a Union involvement in these processes, was fair and adequate in that teachers could be nominated to school panels by their principals. Nevertheless, the AIRC found that a new set of grievance procedures should be inserted into the Victorian award to cover individual grievances relating to refusal to grant salary increments or promotions, transfers and leave. Previously, grievance procedures only covered teachers’ complaints about excessive workload of individuals. Like that grievance, the new items for grievance would involve the Union in all stages of the grievance procedures, including a Union nomination to a joint conciliation committee (86 IR, p. 441). The other significant aspect of this decision was that the AIRC, although declining to vary the Teachers’ Award to allow direct Union involvement in these ‘appointment processes’, did regard many aspects of teachers’ ongoing appointments (increments, promotions and transfers) as conditions of entitlement enforceable by awards. This aspect of the decision gave heart to the Victorian branch in its related industrial campaigns to obtain a new and improved certified agreement for teachers’ conditions and to prevent the education department from effectively stripping the teachers’ awards to a bare minimum set of conditions. Throughout 1997 and 1998 a new leadership in the Victorian branch campaigned vigorously using both electoral intervention strategies in state by-elections and rolling industrial stoppages to pursue the argument that teachers’ working conditions should not be allowed to deteriorate further. In the public arena, the Union branch attacked the obvious increase in class sizes in schools as being indicative of the decline in the quality of public schooling. It called for the recruitment of new teachers and the imposition of class size ceilings on the number of students a teacher should be expected to instruct. This aspect of the campaign struck a sympathetic note with parents, the media and a number of electorates and late in 1998 the Kennett Government promised to address these problems in the next school year (Spaull, 1999). The industrial campaign also included the Union’s opposition to award simplification. The education department hoped to remove a number of entitlements including incremental salaries scales so that it could in its words ‘provide incentive and scope for the implementation of workplace arrangements which will enable schools to operate more effectively’ (Peter Allen (DOE) to teachers, 18 Dec 1997). For its part, the Union branch in Victoria refused to agree to this degree of simplification, especially over matters pertinent to teachers’ workload (for example, teaching hours), and as a result the AIRC was forced to
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arbitrate on these aspects of the dispute. In September 1998 the AIRC ruled that maximum teaching hours as prescribed in the Conditions of Employment Award should be retained and that restrictions on teachers teaching in excess of these hours also be retained, as well as limits on attendance time (AIRC Print Q6318). The other matter in dispute, the education department’s claim to abolish incremental salaries scales and promotion salary points, was retained after the education department and the Union reached a consent position in their negotiations, and later they drew up a new industrial award which combined many elements of the Teachers’ Awards and a number of new changes to teachers’ employment conditions which the Union boasted improved teachers’ conditions (AEU News, 15 Oct 1998, p. 6). This was approved by the AIRC in October 1998 and became a single award (replacing the Victorian Teachers’ Interim Award and the Conditions of Employment Award) which would be called the Conditions of Employment Award, 1998. The Victorian branch’s resistance to award stripping and the AIRC’s decisions on protecting teachers’ working conditions and entitlements were a fillip to Victorian TAFE teachers’ campaigns to prevent erosion of their conditions by award simplification of awards. The same was true for the Union’s branches in other states and territories where the employers of teachers had hoped to limit the reach of federal regulation of teachers’ conditions by the same process (AEU Industrial Brief, No. 6, Oct 1998). In November 1998 the AIRC allowed the Howard Government, through the Minister for Workplace Relations, to make application to it to have a number of awards which contained provisions outside the WRA’s 20 allowable matters to be the subject of a Full Bench review. These awards which cover workers in the media, arts, transport, pastoral and a number of manufacturing industries had been made as agreements between the unions and employers and approved by the AIRC as awards after the introduction of the new Act. The government’s claim, that they were not enforceable because they contained industrial matters that are not allowable under its legislation, was accepted by the AIRC. As a result, it is highly likely that teachers’ federal awards will be the subject of further attempts at award stripping by education employers. In September 1998 a Full Bench arbitrated on a prolonged salaries’ dispute in Victorian TAFE and granted an increase of 8.5 per cent (the Union had claimed a 20 per cent increase). The AIRC ordered these increases because enterprise bargaining between the Union and the
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TAFE employers, which had commenced as early as 1993, had failed on a number of occasions to reach an agreement. As the Commission noted ‘...the relatively extraordinary circumstances associated with the history of the failed agreement, and the absence of salary adjustments of any kind’ warranted a ‘special case’ decision to increase pay rates above the safety net. The Commission was anxious to establish wage rates which constituted ‘a fair and enforceable safety net provision’ that recognised the character of work in the TAFE sector, but it left room in the future ‘for the necessary movement towards agreements binding on the parties at workplace’ level (AIRC Print Q5998). The Union’s branch in Tasmania also used the new legislation to advance a new salaries award for teachers by applying for special access to an arbitral hearing on rates of pay. Under Section 170 MX of the WRA, provision was made for employees on paid rates awards to have easier access to federal arbitration if they could not conclude an enterprise agreement with their employees. This provision was inserted into the legislation by the Democrats in 1996 to ensure that an unequal bargaining relationship for government workers faced with ‘the full legal, political and financial might of a government employer cannot be used to force them into sub-standard agreements’ (AEU Industrial Brief No. 1, Dec 1997). The AEU was one of the first trade unions to obtain special access to arbitration under these provisions. It did so in July 1997 after both it and the Tasmanian government found that they could not reach a salary agreement and both decided to terminate the bargaining period and take the dispute to arbitration. In a previous case of this type of award application involving railway workers in Western Australia, the AIRC had decided to make an award where the AIRC adjudged the union and employer eventually would have reached an agreement if they had continued to bargain. In the Tasmanian teachers’ case, the Union claimed that the AIRC’s reasoning in reaching such a decision was flawed and that it was more appropriate to follow past principles used in other teachers’ salaries decision in both federal and state commissions (including a 1998 Queensland decision on pay rates for Queensland state school teachers) and also to rely on labour market conditions for teaching and the duties and responsibilities of teachers. The case was an opportunity for the Union to return to its national salaries benchmarks for teachers, using the recent New South Wales salaries award for teachers as the benchmark. To do this, the Union revived its arguments from the Western Australian and South Australian disputes that education was a national industry and a
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crucial part of the national and state economy, and that as teachers do the same work, regardless of where they are located in Australia, Tasmanian teachers’ salaries should reflect changes in teachers’ pay elsewhere. The AIRC agreed with the national industry argument but argued that this in itself did not help it determine the level of teachers’ salaries. Similarly, the Union devoted considerable time in the hearing arguing that teachers’ workloads in Tasmania had undergone significant changes since 1992, though it offered this not as an argument on changes in work value but that their work had undergone a similar transformation to teachers elsewhere in the 1990s. The AIRC was not unduly impressed by this argument. It also rejected the Union’s proposition that unequal bargaining power existed in Tasmanian education and reminded the Union that the Tasmanian government had agreed to terminate the bargaining period so that federal arbitration could occur. The inference was that inequalities could occur when governments refused to end a bargaining period, as in Victoria, and thereby ensured that a public sector union would have much more difficulty in obtaining a hearing under Section 170 MX (Outline of AEU submissions n.d.; AIRC Print Q0785). The Union persuaded the AIRC that on the merits of its arguments on comparative teachers’ salaries between Tasmania and elsewhere, Tasmanian state school teachers should be awarded an increase in rates of pay. The increase ordered was a 10 per cent increase between May 1998 and May 1999 which, when added to the 4.1 per cent increase agreed to by the parties during the AIRC conciliation hearing in July 1997, represented a 14.1 per cent increase over two years for Tasmanian teachers. The AIRC concluded its decision with the order that the Tasmanian government and the Union branch should resume their negotiations over conditions of employment claims. It also stated that this decision on rates of pay would not establish any principles with respect to the provision for special access to arbitration. During 1998 an AIRC Full Bench review conducted an inquiry into the appropriateness of the WRA’s intentions to convert paid rates awards to minimum rates awards. The hearing was confined to two Nurses’ Awards covering South Australian nurses and two awards covering Commonwealth public sector workers, but a decision would have implications for all workers employed in the public sectors and some workers in the automobile building industry, the airlines and oil industry. Paid rates awards, like those covering school teachers and other educational workers, tend to specify the actual rates of pay, often including a minimum and maximum with designated salary
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increments within this range. The Howard Government’s argument was that a minimum rate of pay would allow employers in the workplace the flexibility of paying over-award payments and higher allowances to more productive employees. This view was supported by the other conservative governments but was opposed by the unions, the ACTU and the two Labor governments in New South Wales and Queensland. On 20 October 1998 the AIRC ordered that the Nurses awards presented to the Full Bench need not be converted from paid rates to minimum rates. As the Union observed in commentary on the Paid Rates decision, the nurses’ employers had consented to the continuation of the rates of pay and incremental scales. ‘We cannot rely on our employers being as generous’ (O’Connor to branches, 20 Oct 1998). The Union’s comprehensive submission to the Senate inquiry into the status of teachers in 1997 contained a number of interrelated strands on teachers’ employment policies, which it argued would enhance the status of Australian teachers in the next century. Although the emphasis of the submission was on increasing the professional and political status of teachers, considerable attention was paid to the need to establish national standards for teachers’ conditions of employment. These included common qualifications requirements, salaries’ and career paths’ benchmarks and common working conditions in schools. The Union believed that the best way to achieve this national industrial standards framework was by negotiations with the ministerial council, as had been attempted in the award restructuring project. The Senate committee’s report A Class Act (1998) was silent on the question of introducing national industrial standards for teachers, as have been the ministers for education and the federal and state governments. Consequently, the Union declared as a priority issue in 1998 and 1999 a new ‘National Claim Framework’ for educational workers in schools and early childhood centres. The claim consisting of common conditions for all state school teachers (salaries, workloads in classrooms and schools), teacher registration requirements and leave provisions and a localised schedule varied for each system to cover new areas of teaching, locality allowances and conditions of employment for casual teachers, will be negotiated by the state unions with each systems’ employers. The year 1999, described by the Union as its ‘bargaining year’, was to test whether this renewed effort by the Union and its branches would produce a new set of industrial agreements that would materially improve the lot of teachers. However, the Union and its branches
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faced even more of a challenge with federal awards and agreements when the Howard Government introduced its ‘second wave’ of Workplace Relations legislation which threatened to reduce even further the AIRC’s capacity to regulate workers’ terms and conditions of employment.
The fight to save public education The Howard Government either abolished a number of key consultative bodies in education and training which were perceived to be overloaded with trade unionists, or replaced their personnel with its own appointments from professional associations or principals unions posing as professional bodies (Burrow & Martin, 1998, p. 99). The government withdrew its funding from areas where it believed teacher union power to be the most invidious, such as the NPQTL. The new Minister for Education, David Kemp, refused to honour a pre-election commitment to assist in the funding of the ATC and the NSN. The ACT’s governing board decided to become a self-sufficient but smaller body. Its defiance of the minister led to the Commonwealth department cancelling all payments in 1996 that had been guaranteed contractually so that the ATC could not continue to operate commercially. The ATC refused to be dissolved and took temporary refuge in the Queensland Board of Teacher Registration, where it withered from lack of teacher support. The National Schools Network was to survive, but without federal government financial support. The Howard Government’s attack on union power in national education was modest compared with its concerted attack on public education systems. Its new measures were aimed at both reducing Commonwealth and state expenditures on public school systems as part of its general fiscal strategy and restoring non-government education to a competitive position whereby it could offer ‘genuine’ parental choice in schooling. The Commonwealth’s reductions in allocations to the states’ and territories’ education systems was achieved by ‘broadbanding’ its equity programs, so that the Commonwealth’s long-term initiatives in the Disadvantaged Schools Program, English as a Second Language and Students At Risk have been seriously diminished. As a result, stated the NSW Minister for Education, the complex issue of educational disadvantage ‘has been reduced to one of measurable literacy outcomes’ (quoted in Martin, paper on funding, 1998, p. 11, Federal Executive Papers). Moreover, this government-
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manufactured ‘literacy crisis’ was blamed on the public education system and its teachers (B. McGaw, ACER Newsletter, No. 92, 1998). It could only be rectified, suggested the federal minister, by financially rewarding non-government schools and state schools in middle-class communities who tested positively in improved literacy ‘scores’. The teacher unions, along with other influential voices in the education community, were quick to condemn the blatant opportunism of the minister, and his pale imitators in the states, and turned the issue into a serious educational debate about literacy problems and interventionist strategies. The Howard Government concocted a game of statistical smoke and mirrors to suggest that it was expanding its financial assistance to public schooling. This was exposed by the Union and others, including the NSW Labor Minister for Education, as crude sophistry, the beneficiaries of the projected funding growth being the non-government schools at the expense of real decreases in Commonwealth funds to public education in the states and territories (NSW paper, Issues arising from Commonwealth funding policies, MCEETYA meeting 23–24 April 1998, copy with AEU). The Commonwealth government’s increased support to non-government schools was the second prong of its attack on public education. It based its move for increased privatisation of schooling on its long-held view that parental choice in education should be respected. This policy, when wedded to its marketisation model for public services, insisted that families who were prepared to directly contribute to their own education (or health insurance) should be subsidised by the State. To give effect to this position, the Howard Government abolished Labor’s 10-year regulation of the growth of new private schools. Instead the government has funded the expansion of new and smaller schools or the extension of secondary school provision from a small primary school, in some cases in communities where a small state school had been closed by state regulation. Most of these new schools, small as they are and governed by a local religious community, have received the highest categories of Commonwealth financial assistance. The second element of this new privatisation strategy was the introduction in 1997 of the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment. This mechanism for underwriting the growth of enrolments in non-government schools was accompanied by an impost on Commonwealth funds to public education on the transfer of students to the more attractive nongovernment schools. Both the deregulation of the new schools movement in Australia and the financial disincentive scheme for public
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school enrolments have been opposed vigorously by the Union, to no effect on Commonwealth policy. The Howard Government has also introduced substantial financial reductions to the maintenance of the TAFE sector. Moreover, it has followed marketisation policies in several states to open up the TAFE sector to private providers. The effects of these policies are: First, a growing proportion of public funds for VET [Vocational Education and Training] has been transferred from the public to the private training sector under competitive tendering arrangements. In a context of severe budgetary restraint, this has placed TAFE institutions and other public providers under considerable pressure to downsize activities that were formerly recurrently funded and/or to shift a greater share of the costs to fee-paying individuals. Secondly, under User Choice, it is likely that a growing proportion of the costs of initial vocational preparation will be transferred from the private employer to the public taxpayer. Rather than producing greater efficiency therefore, market reforms in VET have simply initiated a process of cost shifting and substitution. (D. Anderson, Jan 1998, p. 13)
In some cases individual institutes have collapsed as viable commercial enterprises. The two ‘victims’ of this Howard Government reform are TAFE students, who are widely seen as a disadvantaged education group, and their teachers who have suffered from exploitative precarious employment practices, heavy and complex workloads and depleted infrastructure supports. These changes in federal funding arrangements and the marketisation of services have been accompanied by the systematic exclusion of the Union and rank and file from policy making in a sector which once prided itself on employee participation in policy and administration at the national, state and work-site levels. The Union’s TAFE division has responded to the changes in the funding and political culture of TAFE with a lively, but defensive campaign, ‘TAFE Works’. Its arguments and public rhetoric have spurred on the Opposition parties in Canberra, a number of state governments and local communities to acknowledge that the TAFE sector has been seriously punished and wounded by the Coalition government. The Union’s response to the Howard Government’s education reforms is multi-layered. Wherever appropriate it shifted its political strategies to industrial arenas by intensifying its efforts to maintain federal regulation of teachers’ conditions and by reviving its national industrial claim framework as a way of effectively improving conditions by bargaining with state employers. The January 1997 Federal
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Conference organised a branches’ discussion around the changing nature of teachers’ work in the system and school levels and this became a springboard for the Union’s ‘Status of Education Workers’ platform which it pursued both industrially and politically. The Union also moved into high gear with its ‘defence of public education’ strategies. The 1997 Federal Conference noted that public education ‘has reached a defining moment in history’ that required ‘unprecedented effort’ by the teacher unions and other groups, to reestablish it as a quality social service in Australia. At the same meeting the Union consolidated its opposition to the 1990s patterns and levels of federal funding by calling for taxation reform. It anticipated that this issue would become the Coalition’s main agenda at the next election. Unlike most other sections in this reform movement, the Union wanted increases in taxation on high income earners, companies and family trusts. Its ‘Raising the Revenue Base’ campaign was a clever attempt to counter the dominance of the economic rationalists in government and administration, with the Union argument that their ‘low tax’ ideology had seriously eroded public investment in Australia’s education sectors. This in turn, argued the Union, had tarnished Australia’s international image as a ‘fair’ and just society and nowhere was this more obvious than in the loss of rights to children to be ‘free of poverty and oppression’. This ‘rights of Australian children’ plank of 1998 became the second part of its platform which argued that the ‘international rights’ of Australian children could only be guaranteed by governments, and in particular the Commonwealth government, to fund the diverse range of student needs in open and inclusive education systems from school to post-compulsory schooling and adult education. Chief among its strategies to obtain these education guarantees from government was that the Union would campaign with parents and community groups to ensure that governments ‘re-establish a genuine free public education system’ with attendant provisions for enhancing preschool education and public TAFE system (Federal Conference 1998, Papers). At the 1996 Federal Conference these two strands were bought together, along with earlier priorities associated with protecting the rights and status of education workers, into endorsement of a new national public education campaign. The Conference’s resolution read: Public education is under direct attack from the Howard Government and thus Conference endorses the decisions by the Federal executive to coordinate a national Public Education Campaign in 1998. This cam-
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paign should ensure that national activities are integrated with state and local activity and be based on the theme Quality Public Education: The Future of Australia. The dual purpose of the campaign is: (i) (ii)
to defend and enhance public education in the face of concerted attacks, and to re-assert community understanding that free quality public education is essential to Australia’s future.
Education workers, parents and the community must be centrally involved and the materials targeted accordingly.
The executive decided that the Union’s campaign aim should be to move votes away from Coalition candidates to parties and candidates with ‘positive public education and industrial policies’. These education and industrial strategies were not inconsistent. The Union was following the usual practice of mounting a national campaign as an overture to its intervention in an election. This time, however, the Union saw its intervention strategy as part of a longer-term educative process to secure a cultural change in the public education in Australian life. Initially the Union had been forced to adopt two stances in its campaign because like most observers it could not conceive of the Howard government losing office in one term. Moreover, the ALP’s policies and positions on education were still as confusing, if not as contradictory, as when it had been in power. The Union, therefore, believed that its national campaign, which aimed to turn the politics of schooling around, would take four years, not four months or four weeks. It sought a similar political impact to the teachers’ campaigns for federal aid to education in the late 1960s. The risk in this strategy was that the unrelenting march of globalisation with its emphasis on private rather than public investment in social services was a force that might not be stopped by a four-year campaign. Between the 1996 and 1998 elections, the Union successfully reestablished its access to and influence on the ALP and the Democrats in Canberra. The Democrats in the Senate remained closely aligned to the Union’s policies, and along with Labor senators managed to conduct a number of parliamentary reviews, publishing as final reports Not a Level Playground (1997), an investigation of the private and commercial funding of government schools, and A Class Act (1998), an inquiry into the status of teachers. These reports publicised the Union’s concerns about school funding and teachers’ work. On other
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issues related to non-government schools and the TAFE sector, the ALP took more persuading, but slowly and in time for its own federal conference it came to re-state its support for the importance of universal free and secular public education and of a viable public TAFE system in the vocational education and training markets (Federal Secretary’s Report for 1997, p. 2, Federal Conference, AEU Federal Conference Papers, 1998; Hewett, Australian TAFE Teacher, March 1998). It was therefore almost inevitable that the Union’s national public education campaign would become a Union attempt to defeat the Howard Government. By early 1998 there was also a growing expectation in the community that the Coalition government could be defeated at the next general election, despite its large majority in the Lower House. At the micro-level, polling for the Union indicated that among swinging voters in 28 marginal Coalition seats, education issues had a high priority, especially among women. Nearly 90 per cent of these voters polled believed that the Howard Government’s financial treatment of government schools had been too harsh and similar proportions of these voters wanted to see significant increases in the funding of government primary schools (Essential Media Communications, 1998). These sentiments influenced the atmospherics of the national public education rally held in Sydney on 23 May 1998. It was jointly convened by the Union and the national state schools’ organisation to publicise the plight of public education and the need to mobilise community and political support for its revival. Pledges of support from the Democrats and the ALP, including the latter’s promise ‘to put in place policies to stop the marginalisation of the government school sector’, abolish the Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment and restore a Disadvantaged Schools Program (National Public Conference, Sydney, May 1998), only heightened the Union’s belief that ‘wearing badges is not enough in days like these’ to quote from the modern Billy Bragg song. The media was suitably impressed by what it heard, especially in Kim Beazley’s personal commitment to public education reform – to see it as the first shots in the 1998 election campaign. Lost in the buzz of electioneering excitement was the ‘conference communique’ which declared in part: 1. That public schools in Australia are central to the creation and maintenance of a pluralistic, caring and cohesive egalitarian society. 2. That children in public schools have an absolute right to free, compulsory, secular education with rich and diverse curriculum, with appropriate class sizes and fully trained qualified teachers.
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3. That it is a fundamental responsibility of governments, both federal and state, to provide funding to ensure that public schools are appropriately resourced to carry out their mission before resourcing private schools. And calls upon: All governments, and particularly the federal Government, to develop a long term funding strategy based on the establishment of a community standard that addresses the real needs of public schools and the children they serve. Such a strategy must include commitment to additional funding for the poorest 25% of schools.
The Union did not reveal to the rally or the media that its own polling in the marginal seats showed that although there were prospects for the loss of Liberal seats in Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania, there was no indication of a swing back to Labor in the New South Wales marginal seats, especially in Sydney. Without a loss of Coalition seats in this state, there was no possibility of a change in government. The affiliates and the rank and file went into the marginal seats attacking both the government’s record on school and TAFE funding policies and, wherever appropriate, the racially divisive policies of the Hanson One Nation. On the latter, the teacher unions were among many others who helped stem the tide of extremist politics. On the main issue of defending public education, the Union ran into the government’s basic electoral strategy of turning the contest into a national referendum on its Goods and Services Tax proposal. Education issues were quickly swamped by the debate over taxation reform, domestic economic management in the shadow of the Asian financial crisis and unemployment. Nevertheless, the Union’s national and local campaigns on the government’s treatment of public education, and the implications of the proposed consumption tax on education services, annoyed the Coalition parties, or so the AEU stated after the election. Certainly the Union’s vigorous advertising in the media, mobile billboards and letterboxes gave Opposition candidates in the marginal seats the opportunity to campaign on the impact of cuts to public schools, childcare and TAFE institutes. At the same time, the Union material exposed the increased private costs to families to provide for their children’s schooling, training and higher education. A national public education day on 17 September attempted to drive home these arguments to the national electorate. The cost of the Union’s national coordination of the election campaign was $70 000. The government would not be drawn into publicly responding to
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the Union’s charges. Its education manifesto was a replay of its 1996 rhetoric: it attacked Labor for creating the literacy crisis in schools, for denying parental choice in education and for doing nothing for early school leavers. It claimed that the Coalition government had rectified these problems by providing national leadership in ‘Raising Standards’, which was the title of its manifesto. It promised to extend this ‘leadership’ by addressing the educational needs of regional and rural Australia and the Catholic school system. Labor’s inertia in school reform, declared the Coalition, was because its policies were dictated to it by the education unions (Federal Executive meeting, 29 Nov 1998). If this were a true statement of Labor Party policy formulation, it might well have indicated the strength of the Union’s influence on the party between 1996 and 1998. But Labor’s campaign on education during the election became as vacuous as the Coalition’s. The ALP policy, which was written by the shadow minister Mark Latham after considerable consultation with the education unions and other groups, had stated that only disadvantaged Catholic schools would be funded on a needs basis, and that federal assistance to the public education systems would be increased (Latham, 23 May 1998, in AEU President’s file). Towards the end of the election campaign, however, the ALP campaign office attached to Beazley promised the Catholic Bishops that most other non-government schools would also continue to be funded, while other parts of the policy related to a fairer system of funding higher education were deleted from the campaign material. Latham was understandably annoyed by the interference from ALP headquarters, while the AEU and the NTEU were dismayed by the party’s attempt to placate the Catholic Church, non-government school authorities and university management, as well as demonstrate to the electorate that it would be fiscally responsible as the government. The election result of course would not have been any different, because education had already been completely marginalised in the national contest over taxation reform (Federal Secretary’s Report for 1998 p. 3). The ‘betrayal’ by the Labor Party angered the Union more than the result of the election. Despite the closeness of the vote, as predicted in the newspapers’ final polls, and the actual results declared after the 3 October election, the Howard Government secured a comfortable win. It lost a number of seats, which it had surprisingly won in 1996 but ended up with a majority of 12 seats in the House of Representatives. The Senate result revealed that the Democrats and several independents would continue to hold the balance of power. The Labor Party had failed to snatch
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victory in its ‘un-winnable’ election because it could not win back enough voters in the outer suburban seats of Sydney (the polls and pundits all agreed that it could not) and unexpectedly in similar types of seats in Brisbane and Melbourne. The AEU Victorian branch’s campaigns in nine Coalition seats in Victoria reveal the same lack of effectiveness which the ALP encountered in that state. The swing to Labor was 3.45 per cent in Victoria compared with the national swing of 1.7 per cent, yet the Liberals lost only three seats – Chisholm in eastern Melbourne, Bendigo and Macmillan in regional Victoria. The six other Melbourne outer suburban seats where the Union had run strong anti-government campaigns were narrowly retained by Liberal incumbents. It appears that these local members ran a better organised grassroots campaign than either the ALP or the sectional groups such as the Union’s state branches (Hannan, Age, 7 Oct 1998). The same pattern of local Liberals’ campaigns outmanoeuvring the ALP and the Union in the Coalition’s marginal seats was repeated throughout Sydney and to some extent in Brisbane (Opinion page – Election, Age, 5 Oct 1998). The ALP blamed itself or other states’ administrations factions, or the quality of preselected candidates for this failure. The Union blamed no one. Instead it implied that although it had helped increase awareness about public education elections, Opposition parties (read the ALP) needed ‘to sharpen and clarify their acts as well’ because education issues did not feature largely in the parties’ campaigns. For public consumption the Union was more positive: But we should not underplay our achievements. Voter disenchantment with education policies and a range of other community issues were prime reasons for the Howard Government’s loss of its huge majority. It is also why the Government’s new – though transparent – ‘caring and sharing’ image is being promoted. (Australian Educator, Summer, 1998, p. 12)
Several branches, including those in South Australia and Tasmania, reported that they had organised effective local campaigns which had helped defeat Coalition candidates or incumbents. Other branches were pleased with their roles in the defeat of One Nation candidates and the victory of several Democrat Senators. The Union also conceded that it had been drawn into a winnable election mood because of the political events of 1998. As a result, its National Public Education Campaign had been partially derailed and the future challenge for the Union is to run the battle for hearts and minds to support public education. The other major challenge for the
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Union is to convince the ALP that it must fight for the elevation of public education. As Durbridge reported to the 1999 Conference: We shouldn’t underestimate how much the conservatives have the public education unions, the AEU, its state associated bodies and the NTEU, in their sights. It is an article of faith for them that the unions and their influence must be removed. However, it’s not enough just to ‘get up their noses’ ...we’ve got to have an alternative party of government with new policies we can endorse. (Federal Secretary’s Report for 1998, p. 3)
This challenge it seems will be just as onerous and painful for the Union as living with the Coalition government for another three years, or longer.
Union records consulted AEU Federal Executive Meetings, files 1.7.34 to 1.7.57 AEU Industrial Brief, No. 1 (December) 1997 – FEUIC AEU Submission to Senate Inquiry the Status of Teachers, 1996 Various school disputes under WRA 1996: Victoria, file 31.8.37 Tasmania, file 31.8.39 South Australia, file 31.8.41 Public Education: Australia’s Future – National Public Education Rally, May 1998, (Material with Spaull) Federal Election 1998 (AEU President’s files)
8 The Union Abroad Education workers share more than just an occupation, they share a passion, a dream, and the belief that education is the only way to achieve equity and to accomplish democratic, economic and social development worldwide. Fred Van Leeuwen, (Education International General Secretary, Nov 1995)
Introduction A distinctive feature of the Union’s activities is its involvement in international education and international trade unionism. Ironically, the Union’s contributions in various overseas arenas are better known, certainly more appreciated, by recipient bodies, international agencies and the teachers’ international community than by most rank and file members in its branches and associated bodies. It is only since the mid-1980s that the Union has sought to cultivate an activist international outlook. Before then its predecessor, the ATF, was relatively parochial, consumed by domestic matters in state education, as evidenced by its policies on raising teachers’ status, obtaining and improving federal funding to schools and other related issues. Only episodically did the Federation’s executive or annual conference utter concerns at developments outside Australia, and then after prompting from the NSWTF because of its then pronounced leftist, world-view of international problems affecting school teachers. As early as 1938 the Federation condemned the attack on teachers’ civil rights in Fascist countries. Later, the Cold War’s tensions produced occasional federation pleas for the role of public education in creating international understanding in 1948 and 1951, or for a reduc-
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tion in nuclear armaments during the international uncertainties that arose in Europe in 1956. Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War did not draw any response from the Federation, the teachers’ anti-war protests being confined to only a few affiliates. In 1970 the ATF conference roundly condemned ‘the philosophy of apartheid’ in South Africa; 12 years later it joined several African countries in moving a similar resolution at a WCOTP assembly. The Federation’s expressions of solidarity with overseas teachers and unions became more regularised with its increasing direct participation in WCOTP activities and the election of Gerry Tickell to the WCOTP executive in 1982. Thus, the attack on teachers’ political rights in West Germany, England and Japan brought forth a series of condemnatory resolutions at a Federation executive meeting in September 1984. Teachers’ rights were extended to human rights issues in the Federation’s opposition to the repressive behaviour of regimes in New Caledonia, the Philippines, Nepal, Fiji and South Africa. By the 1990s the Federation’s focus on human rights questions had spread to East Timor, Israel (the Palestinians) South Korea and Burma. In another direction, the Union of the 1990s has consistently voiced its fears about the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund because the imposed financial cutbacks, it argues, have led to a serious decline in the welfare of people in the developing countries. In general, the Union’s expressions of solidarity with overseas teachers or human rights movements have been carried without major debate. At best, there is occasional raising of eyebrows at the stridency of the wording in specific resolutions, or a smile of bemusement that these ‘motherhood resolutions’ carry no weight in international diplomacy. The one exception to this climate of consensus was the Gulf War. In the previous year the 1990 annual conference passed without debate two resolutions welcoming the end of military conflict emanating from the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The 1991 conference met just after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and a suitable condemnatory message was scheduled late on the agenda. This was brought forward, as Iraq continued to ignore warnings from the USA and her allies to withdraw. On the last day of the conference the debate resumed as news of the attack on Baghdad was announced. The South Australian delegates’ report aptly sums up the ATF’s response: The fundamental contradiction of attempting to end a war while being involved in it was finally resolved as follows: “The ATF condemns all antagonists for failing to fully pursue all peaceful avenues towards a
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solution and calls on the Australian government to adopt an independent and constructive non-military approach to resolving the Gulf War and, therefore, to withdraw Australian forces from the Gulf”. (SAIT Journal, 6 Feb 1991)
The Federation’s and Union’s increasing attachment to an international profile is not found, however, in these examples of symbolic unionism, but in the development and implementation of an international affairs policy.
The making of international policy In 1961, the Canadian Teachers Federation launched its ‘Project Overseas’ scheme with an in-service teacher training scheme with the Nigeria Union of Teachers. The scheme soon became ‘the best international development assistance program in Canada’ (R.M. Baker address in Report of ATF Annual Conference 1974, p. 9). The Canadian Teachers Federation’s quiet but successful overseas assistance scheme, totalling some 20 projects in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, attracted the attention of other teacher unions, including the Federation whose members participated in WCOTP assemblies, regional conferences and visits to Canada. In 1973 the Federation decided to explore the Canadian Teachers Federation’s Project Overseas concept, and after hearing from the Canadian Teachers Federation representatives an ATF Working Party recommended that the union develop an ‘ATF International Cooperation Program’ with the following purposes: 1. The raising of the status and conditions of the teaching profession. 2. The mutual strengthening of teacher organisations. 3. The creation of opportunities for teacher contact between countries.
and the creation of a special central fund for project development. The proposal languished in Federation files, with the only action being ATF support for the Papua New Guinea Teachers Association and the organisation of a one-off ‘regional leaders’ seminar in Adelaide in 1975. It was obvious that the ATF had to ground its particular actions in the core of the objectives that governed its behaviour. Thus the 1977 annual conference extended the ATF’s Constitution to encompass an international object: To formulate and determine action on matters of concern to its members in relation to international affairs and to promote those policies and carry out those actions internationally.
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In order to give flesh to this new object, the Federation conducted an international issues seminar at which WCOTP General Secretary, John Thompson, outlined the roles of the WCOTP and key unions in Canada and Scandinavia in development programs. The seminar acted as a springboard for a major formulation of union international affairs which was later endorsed by the 1979 annual conference. The ATF’s international policy consisted of four parts. It spelt out a ‘rationale’ for the ATF’s international involvement: 1 To exchange ideas and to learn from the experiences of teachers and their organisations in other countries. 2. To bring together teachers throughout the world on the basis of their common interests and to seek to bridge organisational, ideological and other barriers which currently divide them. 3 To provide assistance to the development of united and effective teachers’ organisations throughout the world and to assist them in times of crisis. 4 To have influence on the development of international conventions, covenants, reports, policies and ideas which affect the working conditions, education practice or trade union rights of Australian teachers. 5. To promote peace and international cooperation and understanding and respect for human rights. 6. To monitor and to influence the policies and practices of the Australian Government on international matters of concern to or affecting teachers and to do likewise with non-Government organisations operating in the international sphere. 7. To provide Australian teachers and other organisations with the solidarity of other teachers throughout the world and to have access to international advice and intervention pressure in times of crisis. 8. To seek the extension of educational opportunities to all children in the world.
It then stated its principles of association and participation which, in the context of the affiliates’ boycott of the WCOTP regional conference in Indonesia, emphasised that ATF’s participation in such fora should be based on ‘open-entry’ for delegations and host nations’ respect for human rights and teachers rights. A third section highlighted ATF’s attitude to international teacher unionism; it reiterated its traditional support for WCOTP, but also expressed a commitment to the goal of unification of international teachers’ organisations. The fourth section, and the cornerstone of the new policy, was devoted to ‘the substance of international involvement’:
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Provide assistance of a mutually agreed kind to teachers’ organisations in other countries, both to further their development and to assist them in times of crisis. In the provision of this assistance, the facilitating mechanisms of WCOTP will be employed as far as possible and assistance from the Australian Government will be sought particularly for activities in the professional area. The financing of this assistance will be as agreed upon by the ATF Conference in the case of the ATF or as determined within the framework of national policy by the affiliates. As a general rule, assistance to teachers’ organisations in the Asian and Pacific region will have a first priority for funds.
Finally, an in-house section was endorsed which established certain principles for the selection of ATF delegations to international fora. In the future, ATF delegations should be representative of all affiliates and there should be a balance of representatives experienced in WCOTP procedures and affairs and ‘new’ representatives to spread the opportunities for teacher unionists to obtain international experience. The importance of this new comprehensive policy to the Federation was that it provided a framework for the ATF’s practical involvement in international activities. It clearly established the ATF’s determination to give material demonstration of its new policies by exploring a number of mechanisms for Australian teacher unions to become involved in assistance schemes for the emerging teacher unions of the South Pacific region. Thus the 1979 annual conference approved an investigation of the needs of these unions, further information on the Canadian and Swedish assistance schemes (in which both the national teachers’ federation and the national governments provided development funds), establish a coordinative framework with the New Zealand Educational Institute, and possibly the Canadian Teachers Federation, for a regional assistance plan and explore the feasibility of creating a federation of Pacific Teachers organisations. The Federation had attended a WCOTP South Pacific regional workshop in Port Moresby in 1978 and henceforth it played a substantial role in this workshop in the region on a biennial basis. At the Cook Islands seminar in 1984 the Council of Pacific Teachers Organisation was established to which 16 teacher unions from 12 countries in the South Pacific region affiliated. Initially its secretariat was based in Fiji, but after Richard Walsham was elected its secretary the regional body was administered from the Federation’s national office in Melbourne.
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At the ATF’s annual conference in 1981, the concept of fixed resource allocations to international affairs was accepted along with specific targets for these commitments. Initially 2 per cent of the ATF’s income was to be devoted to international work, with a longer term target of 5 per cent to be set after ATF mutual assistance schemes were in place. This decision in 1981 was to provide the financial arrangement for the creation of the ATF International Trust Fund (see next section). The underlying reasons for the change were that during the 1970s teacher unionism in Australia became large and relatively affluent. The growth in union membership and union density in this decade and into the 1980s placed the state unions and the Federation in positions of abundance. Several unions, notably the NSWTF, SAIT and the Victorian unions, dabbled at forms of mutual assistance and support to overseas teacher unions. This sentiment found its way into their national federation and provided the rationale for the Federation to become outward looking in its policies and programs. This shift in emphasis, a sign of organisational maturity in established teacher unions, coincided with WCOTP’s adoption of the ‘mutual assistance’ concept in the 1970s. The North American and most European teacher unions were also affluent organisations and already the Canadian and Nordic federations had pioneered development programs in Latin America and Africa. The WCOTP position had a personalised delivery-mode for the ATF because Robert Harris, formerly of SAIT, had been appointed WCOTP’s development officer. The new target area for WCOTP was the Asian region and it seemed logical that the Australian and New Zealand unions adopt part of the region as their particular sphere of influence. The South Pacific countries were at that time part of or just removed from European colonialism. Teachers were often in the vanguard of nationalist or independent movements and their fledgling unions were often one of the few sources of criticism of colonial administrations or new independent governments. The time, therefore, was appropriate for the Australian and New Zealand teacher unions to assist financially and otherwise in the organisational development of these new unions. Moreover, the Federation was on the rim of South East Asia. Independent teacher unions in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines had been replaced by state-controlled teacher unions. There much was required of WCOTP and its Australian, New Zealand and Japanese affiliates to demonstrate to
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teachers in these countries the importance of independent teacher unionism in the development of public education systems. Finally, the Australian federation had its own emotional ‘leftist’ links to teachers in countries like China (teachers’ study tours to China had been a feature of grassroots involvements since the ‘opening up’ of China after 1970), South Africa, the last great freedom movement in the southern hemisphere, and Vietnam, the site of Australia’s military involvement in the 1960s. Thus, the Federation’s embrace of internationalism at the end of the 1970s was guided by the opportunities presented to provide union leadership in parts of its region where new teacher unionism and new teacher movements were in the ascendancy. Over the next five years the Federation deliberately attempted to educate membership on the importance of its international work. At an annual conference workshop in 1984 the ATF’s emerging international profile was discussed at length. The rationale for Australian teachers’ involvement was spelt out clearly in the workshop’s report to conference: Our words and actions as a mature teacher organisation not only need to be judged and accepted by others but, given our overriding concern for the education of all people which itself has an important developmental dimension, we prima facie have something to say of international significance. ...In other words, a role for the ATF at the international level allows Australian teachers a direct voice at the international level. Whether relating to the particular concerns of teachers’ professional development or industrial rights, or relating to the wider cultural, intellectual and political concerns of teachers in their relations with their students, such opportunities should not be missed, nor responsibilities evaded. (ATF Annual Conference 1984, item 13.2)
The International Year of Peace, 1986, provided a fresh focus for the ATF’s international policy. In anticipation of this event, the Federation established an international committee that was commissioned to revise the 1979 policy statement in time for the 1986 annual conference and then consider how the Federation might gainfully involve rank and file membership of the affiliates in the ATF’s international program. The latter issue had been a contentious one, and still is within the Union, because most members were not aware, or indeed interested, in their unions’ international programs. The Federation’s international committee saw publicity of its activities in state teachers’ journals as a key strategy and it also encouraged the affiliates to
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establish their own international committees, with mixed success. A novel approach was to encourage the linking of teachers’ vacation travel to visits to other WCOTP affiliates, especially in the region, and the establishment of a members’ register of teachers who, because of fluency in foreign languages or intimate knowledge of a particular country, would be able to directly assist specific international programs in the ATF (Australian Teacher, No. 15, Feb 1986). Both of these approaches failed to ‘reach’ large numbers of teachers. Throughout this period the Federation kept in close contact with Robert Harris (formerly of SAIT) and WCOTP executive, and this ensured that ATF priorities in international matters were in accord with that of the international body, WCOTP. On a visit to Australia early in 1986 Harris told the Federation that WCOTP’s priority areas were to be peace, disarmament and human rights through education, defence of teachers’ and unions’ rights and the expansion in international development programs. These priorities became the framework for the Federation’s enhanced involvement in international affairs for the rest of the 1980s (ITF Board Report, 14 Feb 1985). By 1993 the Union had inherited 10 years of practical international unionism centred on the work of the International Trust Fund, the Council of Pacific Teachers Organisation and its development programs in the region and southern Africa which it conducted in conjunction with the ACTU’s international development arm, other non-government organisations such as the Council for Overseas Aid and with the Australian government’s international aid and development agencies. The Union’s international involvement was firmly based on earlier principles, to which it added the concerns and contingencies of the 1990s. These included advocacy for the right to education in open public education systems, a number of measures to combat all forms of racism, support for the advancement of self-determined education for the world’s indigenous peoples and measures to reduce the rising level of child labour. By then the Cold War had ended but the struggle to implement comprehensive disarmament policies had to be revived. Local wars and civil strife prevailed and the Federation believed that these could not be alleviated until poverty and inadequate basic schooling was eradicated by means of effective financial support to poor countries by western nations. Finally, structural adjustments movements in a number of countries have led to de-collectivisation of unions and suppression of union leaderships. These moves had to be opposed by the Union for both ideological and practical reasons, as
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did the need to develop a critique of globalisation’s effects on public education and teachers (Federal Conference 1994 paper, item 13.l). In March 1994, therefore, the AEU sponsored an international conference on globalisation and education.
The International Trust Fund The ITF, which was proposed as early as 1974, was established by the Federation in 1981. The ITF trustees committee, later to be called the ITF board, commenced operations on a modest scale in May 1982. It was keen to emulate the spirit of the Canadian and Swedish schemes and meet the new expectations of WCOTP that the affiliates in the richer countries assist those in other parts of the world. The ITF’s initial planning coincided with government rethinking on the purposes of and arrangements for Australian’s overseas aid programs. The Hawke Government established an inquiry into overseas aid (the Jackson Committee) which in 1984 proposed that a closer relationship between government and non-government organisations would improve overseas aid policies and funding. The inquiry found that Australian overseas aid programs had three major and interrelated objectives: humanitarian, commercial and strategic (political and diplomatic), of which the first was the priority objective and should remain so in framing policy and specific programs in the future (Kilby, 1996). The ITF objectives acknowledged humanitarian aid, especially during times of crisis or emergency, but was more attuned to strategic objectives which saw foreign aid as strengthening the role of civil society, or at least an open state, which in the case of public education was to enhance the role of the teachers not only in schooling but in community leadership and participation and empower teacher unions, as part of trade unionism, to become independent and viable organisations in these new post-colonial nations. Thus the first priorities of funding ITF projects were to: promote the development of united independent and strong education unions through training courses and other effective means;
and provide solidarity assistance at times when a union may be facing oppression.
Later in the 1980s other priorities were established which reflected both internal pressures within the Federation and the need to address
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the persistent problems of developing nations. These priorities included aid projects that would: • develop women’s participation and leadership in education unions; • promote the principles of human and labour rights amongst the leadership and membership of education unions; • pursue important humanitarian issues such as child labour and campaigns against illiteracy and the oppression of women, indigenous peoples and other sections of society. (ITF statement, 1995)
The ITF was initially organised on a conference-elected board of trustees of experienced teacher union leaders, one from each affiliate, with ex-officio membership of the board being prescribed to the ATF president, general secretary and the national/federal officer responsible for international policy. The ITF board’s decisions were subject to annual conference ratification. The original funding arrangement was that the ATF contribution would be allocated from a set percentage of the ATF’s annual income, but in 1990 this contribution was set as a financial levy on state affiliates. Affiliates and individuals could make donations to the fund, while grants for specific projects would be solicited from the official Australian Development Assistance Bureau (ADAB), other overseas aid organisations and from the ACTU. It was the responsibility of the ITF Board to fund projects that were referred to it by the Federation and its affiliates, itself, ADAB or other government or voluntary agencies. In deciding on a particular project the board was required to take into account the Federation’s priorities. The funding of any project was to be based on four principles: (i). The purpose of programme funding (other than emergency assistance) will be to support the development of the recipient organisation’s capacity to successfully address the identified issues and to develop permanent activist capacity. (ii) Support for particular programs will be for fixed periods. The program activity will include the drafting of an organisation development plan about whom the recipient will apply the capacity to address the identified issue. (iii) The AEU will take into account the potential recipient’s own input into each proposed program in determining levels and allocations of support. (iv) Each program activity will be formally evaluated.
As it developed, the ITF channelled most of its funds directly into projects within the region, though some funds were also channelled through WCOTP funding to teacher organisations in Central and Latin America and Africa. Thus one of the earliest decisions was to provide
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$4000 to WCOTP to help it rebuild a teachers’ organisation in Chile after the Chilean Teachers Union had been suppressed by the Pinochet Government in 1973. Previously it had sponsored a visit to Australia by the Japanese Teacher Union, and it had convened a South Pacific forum in Brisbane. The earliest examples of the Federation’s direct involvement in overseas teacher union development were in ITF’s establishment and maintenance (along with the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers Association) of the Council of Pacific Teachers Organisations, its financial support to the Papua New Guinea Teachers Association, an attempt to promote independent unionism in the Philippines (the Alliance of Concerned Teachers) which included the sponsorship of a visit to Australia of one of its leaders in 1985, and the funding of a training program for women teacher unionists in the Indonesian union (PGRI). Part of this latter program was conducted by an Australian teacher, Alexia Banikoff, on behalf of the Federation. In its early work in the South Pacific the Federation was brought into the cutting edge of the New Caledonia (Kanaky) independence movement. At its annual conference in Hobart in January 1985, ATF invited one of the Kanak leaders, and former local teacher syndicate founder, Jacqueline de Teix to address the conference. She did so during a week of intense political debate abroad on French plans for Kanak independence and the re-emergence of open conflict between Europeans and the Kanak people’s liberation movement. The ATF responded unanimously to de Teix’s appeal by authorising the International Trust Fund to provide $10 000 for a ‘free press’ printing system and other material forms of assistance to the fledging teacher union. This was the first time ATF was on hand to provide generous, practical support to a liberation movement in conflict with a European colonial administration. (This same annual conference gave similar offers of practical support and political expression to its own small affiliate, the NTTF, which had experienced a dramatic collapse in members following the Northern Territory government’s decision to withdraw the automatic deductions of teacher subscriptions). In mid1987 the ATF hosted a course for union educators on behalf of the Council of Pacific Teachers Organisations. Some 20 representatives of the region attended a successful course at the Trade Union Training Authority’s national college. The Council also provided direct assistance to the Fiji Teachers’ Union following the military coup of 1987. The Federation’s ITF did not rely solely on requests for project assistance from WCOTP or its own affiliates’ interests. Wherever possible it
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sent Australian unionists to implement a particular project. Thus it financed SAIT’s Leonie Ebert’s tour of the Philippines in January 1985. She was commissioned to investigate how ITF funds were being used by the Alliance of Concerned Teachers in its human rights campaign, to assess its claims for further ITF assistance and to report to the ATF and to WCOTP on the likelihood of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers seeking affiliation with WCOTP. In May 1987, Greg Thomas, a VSTA official, visited the Vietnam Teachers Union on behalf of ITF to investigate the ways the Federation and its affiliates might assist in the development of the new teacher union in Vietnam. This visit was the touchstone by which the Australian union developed closer material links over the next decade in what was the Federation’s (and the Union’s) only open access to a communist nation’s school system (ITF Board Minutes). By 1990, ITF funds had grown from a total allocation of $40 000 in 1985 to nearly $300 000 p.a. Of this, the teacher unions contributed some $180 000. Attempts by the federal office and ITF in 1994 to develop new methods of financing the Union’s international activities met with an almost deafening silence in the branches and associated bodies. Despite their own financial problems generated by government cutbacks in teacher numbers, most state unions either met or promised to meet the 0.7 per cent of membership income in this period (ITF Report 1995, p. 1). By the end of the 1990s this target has been met by every branch and associated body and the ITF received over $320 000 p.a. from the Union’s membership. The main flow of ITF funds in the early 1990s was to the South Pacific region, primarily in support for the Council of Pacific Teachers Organisations, even after the regional office moved from Melbourne to Fiji in 1991. Some of these Council of Pacific Teachers Organisations’ funds went towards the Union hosting union development courses for South Pacific and Asian teacher unionists, including the women’s network scheme, at Albury–Wodonga and in Melbourne. ITF funds were also directly employed to assist in the establishment of a new union in Tonga and improve teacher unionism in Fiji. The Federation’s view of the teacher union world, however, was gradually moving to other horizons. The ITF provided its first financial assistance to Central America with its grant through WCOTP to support the beleaguered teacher union in Nicaragua. Elsewhere, the Federation had provided on-the-ground support for refugee groups. For example, it used the ACTU’s Australian People for Health, Education and Development
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Abroad (APHEDA) grants to employ an Australian ESL teacher in a Palestinian camp in Israel and employed another Australian teacher in a South African National Congress refugee school in Tanzania. The ATF had first focused on South Africa in 1986 when it joined WCOTP and several European national federations in providing financial assistance to the black African Teachers Association of South Africa (ATASA). Earlier, SAIT had helped create teachers’ credit unions in Southern Africa. The Federation’s support of $10 000 annually to ATASA made it a junior partner to the Nordic, and later the Netherlands, teacher unions, but it helped in strengthening the role of the South African union in its promotion of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms. This was a first step to WCOTP and local unions in South Africa moving towards ‘unity building’ which became the Harare Accord of April 1988, an agreement aimed at creating one national teacher union in South Africa which would be committed ‘to a unitary, non-racial democratic South Africa’. In October 1990, some 1500 delegates from 13 teacher unions, meeting under the auspices of the South African trade union congress, formed the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU). This union, which reflected the range of political and educational bodies in South Africa, was to become a prime example of united non-racial unionism in South Africa and demonstrated to locals and outsiders the importance of teacher mobilisation in the campaign to develop a new and democratic South Africa. The Federation, and later the Union, continued to fund the SADTU as a member of the WCOTP/European consortium. The consortium’s finances provided over 90 per cent of the SADTU’s funding for the union leadership training, membership recruitment, publications and ‘capacity building’ until the organisation became self-reliant in 1995. At the same time, the Australian union exerted constant pressure on the Australian government, the ACTU and the South African Embassy in Canberra to ensure that the National Party government in Pretoria granted official recognition to the SADTU. This was not to be achieved until 1992. Similarly, the AEU used its influence in Canberra to call for the reinstatement of SADTU teachers in schools before and after the two-week teachers’ strike in August 1993. This type of international pressure, which was typical of WCOTP’s approach to South African teacher unionism, undoubtedly helped provide an international climate which assisted the local campaign that eventually secured from government ‘the right to strike’ for teachers. In a similar vein, the AEU,
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along with others, encouraged the SADTU to affiliate with the trade union congress (COSATU) in April 1994. In 1998 the Union phased out its ITF funding of the SADTU. The AEU took considerable pleasure in being partly involved in the development of teacher union unity in South Africa and the roles that the SADTU played in the formation of one of the major political revolutions of the late 20th century. But the AEU did not neglect other teacher unions’ struggles to achieve legitimacy in the national education system. While South Africa was always in the contemporary international spotlight, Nepal was in the shadows. During the 1980s, Nepal National Teachers Association (NNTA), established in 1979, along with other trade unions in a pro-democracy movement, suffered considerable repression at the hands of an autocratic, absolute monarch and his government. At the behest of WCOTP, the Federation protested vigorously to the Australian and Nepalese governments after the NNTA was disbanded and several of its officials killed and eight teachers gaoled in 1987. It also helped prepare a WCOTP case for an ILO inquiry into the loss of trade union rights in Nepal. It continued to give moral and material support after the NNTA was forced underground and, when it re-emerged, to organise a teachers’ strike as part of a pro-democratic movement in early 1990. The NNTA was permitted to operate as a teachers organisation in 1990, although the government sponsored a rival and compliant teachers association. The Union’s support for the NNTA was twofold. It sent an ESL teacher to Nepal in 1991, and it began to help fund part of the NNTA’s administration. The ITF has given the NNTA, via WCOTP, between $10 000 and $20 000 every year since 1991 so that the NNTA can maintain the salary of a general secretary, the travel costs of 14 zone coordinators and a photocopier in the national office. Richard Walsham, the Union’s deputy secretary and international officer, visited the NNTA in mid-1992 to assess the ways ITF could continue to assist the association. He also arranged for a small NNTA delegation to visit Australia in 1993 which helped Australian teachers and other trade unionists appreciate the precarious existence of the NNTA in Nepalese politics. The NNTA’s struggles and its central role in Nepal’s pro-democracy movement appealed directly to the Union’s beliefs that its international efforts could reap dividends. In 1998 the two unions entered into a three-year project agreement, funded by the ITF, which aims to provide the long-term sustainability and eventual self-sufficiency of the NNTA. Since 1995 the main bilateral programs funded by ITF have shifted
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away from the Philippines and South Africa to Vietnam, South Korea and, very recently, to East Timor. With the collapse of the Soviet Union ‘empire’, Vietnam’s teacher union, the National Educational Trade Union of Vietnam (NETUV), turned to the international alliances of WCOTP and particularly its Australian affiliates. The AEU had developed firm contacts with the NETUV by way of officer visits to Hanoi in the early 1990s, and it joined the NETUV and the Swedish teachers confederation in a project consortium in 1995. The project, of the union-development type, aimed to organise preschool teachers into a new section of the NETUV. These teachers, who were previously employed by the Ministry of Health, and were now governed by the Ministry of Education, were largely unorganised and their employment conditions were unregulated. The Education International (EI) project, which was carried out over 1996 and 1997, consisted of an occupational survey of pre-school teachers’ employment, status and working conditions, a recruitment drive for membership of these teachers – which initially resulted in 23,000 new members for the NETUV (out of a possible 120 000 workers) – and advice on national salaries negotiations which ultimately helped secure a major increase in preschool teachers’ salaries (ITF Report for 1997, pp. 7–9). In 1998 the same consortium agreed to develop a two-year project to provide basic union training of NETUV representatives in schools and colleges (ITF Report for 1998, p. 8). A more modest ITF union development project was introduced into South Korea in the same period. There, the militant, pro-democracy union was under attack from an authoritarian, anti-union government. The ITF project, which provided training for activist union rank and file, consisted of two Australian trade union trainers spending a week in Seoul in November 1997 to trial a training program for the Korean Teachers Union. This was to become the model for a rank and file union education program which the ITF is to fund over the next two years. In 1998 the Korean Teachers Union, after a decade of intense political struggle, obtained at law the right to organise Korean teachers. The legitimation of the union will provide new demands on the ITF’s union development projects in South Korea. Announcements by the new Indonesian government in late 1998 to offer some form of independence to the people of East Timor prompted an immediate response from APHEDA and Australia’s education unions to provide material as well as moral support for this process. Federal Secretary Durbridge, acting on behalf of the ITF, joined an ACTU official and Patrick Lee from the Independent Education Union
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(IEU) in a fact-finding mission to East Timor early in 1999 (ITF Board Meeting, 16 Jan 1999). As a result of this visit an agreement was reached between the Australian unions and the Fretilin leadership to provide funds and eventually Australian officers for a literacy project in elementary schools, teacher training in literacy, an ESL training program, a self-awareness, renewal of history curriculum development project which might be used in the construction of a new national curriculum, and a union training program for the emerging local trade union movement (AEU et al., Report to the ACTU International Committee, 23 Feb 1999). In the same period, the ITF acting on behalf of EI, sent Union president Burrow to Indonesia to meet with officials of the PGRI. Her mission was to assess the economic and social effects of the ‘Asian financial crisis on teachers’ and explore the possible roles of the PGRI, and new union breakaways, on the political reformation process in Indonesia. Burrow’s report became the focal point of discussion about the PGRI at an early 1999 meeting of the EI Executive Board (Burrow report to ITF Board). It is obvious that Indonesia and East Timor will become a major focus of ITF’s interests and commitments in the near future. Already the Union has become directly involved in the educational reconstruction of the new nation of East Timor. The Union’s ITF has continued to fund development work in Asia’s poorest countries. The three education unions and APHEDA have funded various Australian teachers to help improve educational provisions in Cambodia. Their specific target is to assist in the teacher training of vocational education workers and a women teachers’ skillsdevelopment program. In Burma, while the Union has been denied entry to introduce a union training program for teachers, it has, with the support of EI, maintained community development programs in two Burmese refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border. The ITF’s funds, which are matched by the federal government’s AusAid, are employed to provide basic teacher training and the training of community leaders. APHEDA and the AEU also provide training for vocational educators in one of the camp (Education International, 4(4) 1998, p. 27). In its multi-lateral foci the ITF has concentrated on implementing two aspects of EI policy in the region. The first, a women’s network program, aims through skills development to enhance the opportunities for women education workers to participate fully in education in Asian Pacific countries. The ITF has built on its original women’s programs in the South Pacific and extended them to a large and continu-
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ous project for Indian women and, more recently, a project in Malaysia. In another direction, the Union directly, and not through the ITF, has continued to campaign against the destructive elements of globalisation in the region. This includes not only criticism on international finance bodies but also claims for the cancellation of international debts of Australia’s poorest neighbours. The AEU has also attended ‘the people’s conferences’ which have preceded plenary meetings of the Asian Pacific Economic Council in Vancouver, Kuala Lumpur and Wellington, as well as being a major participant in EI’s forums on the impact of new economic policies and the ‘Asian financial crisis’ on public education systems. In yet another direction, the Union was a key participant in a regional ILO and UNESCO joint seminar on the status of teachers, held in Fiji in September 1998. Using its considerable knowledge of the teachers’ work problems in Australia, as seen in its submissions to the Australian Senate Inquiry into teachers’ status, the Union was able to assist discussion on gender issues in teaching, the central role of teachers in school reform and issues related to teachers’ professional development, teacher education’s ‘new’ curriculum and professional registration strategies (International Report to Federal Conference 1999, pp. 6–7).
Education International Before examining the role of the Union in the formation and growth of a new, single international teachers’ federation, it is necessary to appreciate the historical contexts to the international organisation of teacher unions. The idea of an international federation of school teachers’ associations is nearly as old as teacher unions in Europe (that is, the 1870s). But attempts at regular meetings between French, German, Dutch and Belgium teachers were doomed to failure because of nationalistic fervour that preceded and accompanied World War I. After the war, internationalism in education re-emerged (as it had after the end of the Franco-Russian War) as teacher unions yearned for a lasting peace. But the movement was undermined by the powerful forces of European particularism in teacher unions. Thus, international federations were created for Catholic teachers’ bodies, socialist, and communist teachers. The largest of these were FIPESO, the socialist unions’ federation (estb. 1919) and the ITST (estb. 1926), a social democratic group which was affiliated to what is the forerunner of today’s
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International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). In North America, the large National Education Association in the USA created and dominated the World Federation of Education Associations from 1922. It attracted little support outside North America, except among British, Irish and Japanese unions. Because of distance and isolation, the Australian Teachers Federation did not affiliate with any of these international federations in the interwar years, though the NSWTF maintained contacts with the ITST and the Education Workers International in Europe. International teacher unionism collapsed with the advent of Fascist regimes in Europe and the outbreak of World War II. After the war, pre-war configurations re-appeared but in a new form of particularism based on ‘Cold War’ politics. The ITST became the International Federation of Free Teachers Unions and affiliated to the ICFTU which was based in Brussels and later Amsterdam. The largest rival group to this federation was the Communist Teachers Federation (WFTU) which was based in the ‘Iron Curtain’ countries and located in Prague. The National Education Association (NEA) in North America reconstituted its own international federation, the World Organization of the Teaching Profession in 1946, which included its pre-war European and Latin American groups, and eventually attracted the interest of the ATF. The rival to the NEA, the American Federation of Teachers, affiliated with IFFTU. In 1952, a loose international confederation of WOTP, FIPESO and a smaller European federation created WCOTP. For nearly 10 years WCOTP and WFTU cooperated under an International Joint Committee (Thompson, 1969; Office of the Joint Committee of International Teachers Federations, 1959; IFFTU, 1993). The Australian Teachers Federation was a foundation affiliate of WCOTP. As seen in Chapter 1, the Federation gradually became an active member of WCOTP, especially in the Asia and Pacific regions. But the ATF, especially its small but influential left-wing factions, was never comfortable with the domination of WCOTP by the NEA and the Washington operation of the WCOTP secretariat. This unease was accentuated in the 1960s after it was claimed that an American foundation (the Vernon Foundation) which made substantial donations to WCOTP was supposedly a conduit of the American CIA (Thompson, 1969, p. 344). At the same time, WCOTP’s reluctance to associate with the other European-based internationals went against Australian teacher unionism’s basic sentiments of teacher unity. For over a decade the Federation consistently called for international rapprochement as a step towards some kind of eventual merger of the teachers’ interna-
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tionals. At the WCOTP Assembly at Regina, Canada in 1986, the ATF delegation moved to the forefront of the debate on WCOTP offering the hand of cooperation with the other three international federations. The year before, Al Shanker the American president of IFFTU had made a similar gesture to WCOTP. Within WCOTP a new secretary general, John Thompson, assisted by Robert Harris and others, helped end both the perceived American domination and its isolationist positions. WCOTP had moved from Washington to Morges Switzerland in 1971 and its leadership began to construct WCOTP as a ‘United Nations’ organisation of teacher unions, open to all education workers, regardless of race, creed, colour, politics and religion. By 1986 it represented over 5 million teachers in 80 countries. ATF’s hosting of the WCOTP Assembly in Melbourne in 1988 and the election of Walsham to the WCOTP executive the same year confirmed that WCOTP was ready to face a new wave of internationalism. No longer were many of its constituent members hiding from the fact that their organisations were trade unions of teachers, even the NEA had become more trade union-orientated, although it still could not effect meaningful cooperation with the American Federation of Teachers. At the same time, ATF was playing its part, especially in promoting teacher unity among the three Swedish unions, in Japan and, more significantly, among the teacher unions of South Africa. All of these changes were not as profound as the political changes within the Soviet Union–Eastern Europe bloc which saw the fall of totalitarian regimes and the rise of independent workers and teacher unions. These changes resonated within the ‘old’ European international teachers’ federations. In May 1989 IFFTU proposed that it and WCOTP merge and create a new international teacher union secretariat that would be attached to the ICFTU in Brussels. In January 1990 WFTU, the old communist bloc dominated federation, which was losing its hold over national affiliates – indeed Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, as well as Vietnam’s teacher union had already proposed to join WCOTP – called for the merger of all the four international teachers federations. In March 1990 WCOTP’s executive announced that it was prepared to enter discussions with any or all of the other internationals to see whether ‘teacher union unity’ was possible, and followed this with discussions with each of the other federations. The IFFTU was the more amenable to the WCOTP discussions, but Shanker and his Amsterdam secretariat disturbed WCOTP’s leaders with their ‘a take it or leave it’ approach to the possible merger, the implication being
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that if WCOTP did not agree, many of its affiliates would leave WCOTP for a revitalised IFFTU. The WCOTP Assembly at San Jose, Costa Rica in August 1990 was the crucial test of WCOTP’s support for international teacher unity. It also was a significant meeting for the Australians because it was the first one organised by WCOTP’s new secretary general, Australian Robert Harris and the assembly-elected WCOTP’s first woman president Mary Futrell, an African-American teacher from the NEA. Three schools of opinion had emerged from the WCOTP affiliates present as to the question of an international merger. First, many of the Latin American unions wanted WCOTP to pursue a merger of the four internationals so that they could minimise the influence of the IFFTU and its American union affiliate. In contradistinction to this, a number of European and African unions wanted to accept the IFFTU’s merger on its terms which would restrict access to those unions which were not of the same political and trade union bents as the IFFTU. The third school, of which the Australians, Scandanavians and most British unions belonged, was for WCOTP to seek a merger with the IFFTU, provided that IFFTU would accept a more open ‘United Nations’ approach of no exclusions on political/ideological grounds, so leaving open the way for later mergers with the other two federations. This approach won the support of the assembly and it voted 879 to 229 to pursue as a priority a merger with the IFFTU and become an international trade secretariat within ICFTU as a step towards overall teacher unity (Echo, September, 1990; Australian Teacher, No. 27, 1990). Unity negotiating teams from WCOTP and IFFTU first met in France in January 1991 and continued hard bargaining, principled compromises and faithful reports back to each international. For nearly two years the best features of each organisation were slowly melded into a draft constitution for a new structure. The following provisions (which the ATF had helped construct) were incorporated into the proposed new organisation • guaranteed seats for women on the new Executive Committee; • an elected General Secretary; • a Committee of experts on membership to ensure consistency in dealing with membership applications; • assertion of the independence of the organisation from political parties of ideological or religious groupings and governments; • association with the ICFTU as a trade secretariat of that body; • a statement that the organisation shall be guided by the ideals of democracy, human rights and social justice;
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• provision for sectoral standing committees and a status of women standing committee. (Australian Teacher, No. 32, 1992)
The ATU strongly supported each provision and in fact helped shape the guarantee of seats for women on the proposed executive. It was also decided to base the new international in Brussels, the headquarters of ICFTU. Mary Futrell was to become the first president, while the general secretary was to be Fred Van Leeuwen, the former secretary. (Harris was to stay in Switzerland and become an executive officer in charge of inter-governmental relations; he later became a senior consultant to the secretariat.) It was expected that the new organisation would have an initial membership of 18 million education workers, from 225 unions in 129 countries, but this could increase to 25 million if the former Soviet Union and several other unattached teacher unions were to join. The federation was to be called Education International and it was formally constituted at a combined meeting of WCOTP and IFFTU world conferences in Stockholm on 26 January 1993. The date (Australia Day) was not lost on the Australian delegation. The final meeting of WCOTP assembly, which had preceded the Stockholm meeting, found the ATF combining with the Portuguese federation to sponsor a resolution condemning the Indonesian government’s policy on East Timor, and called for the right of the East Timorese to self-determination. The resolution and the proposers were vigorously attacked by the Indonesian teachers’ delegation – its union being a state-controlled body. The Canadians, as is often their style, called for an even-handed approach but the call was ignored by the ATF delegation’s determination to denounce the Indonesian government and its supporters. The resolution was carried without any recrimination against the Australians’ stubbornness. Sharan Burrow was immediately appointed to the secondary education committee, and in 1995, she was elected a vice-president of EI. The Indonesian teachers federation (PGRI) continued to criticise the Federation, now the Union, in subsequent years, claiming that the Union had not attempted to understand the differences in union behaviour and expectations between so called North and South countries. At its June 1993 executive meeting the Union issued the following statement: The ATU points out that the resolution it submitted to the WCOTP World Assembly on East Timor contained no criticism of the PGRI or its members. This has not prevented the PGRI from denigrating the ATU.
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION On the issue of East Timor, the Australian Government is out of touch with the views of the Australian people. The ATU is also proud of the significant record of our trade union movement in supporting the struggle of the Indonesian people for independence from the Dutch colonialists after the Second World War. The PGRI may feel or be obliged to endorse the policies of the Indonesian Government. The Education International is required, under its Constitution, to be beholden to no government.
Relations between the two unions deteriorated even further and the Union questioned whether the ACTU should continue to financially assist the peak-union body in Indonesia (International Report for 1995, p. 16). As seen earlier in this chapter, the beginnings of a rapprochement with Indonesian teachers only commenced with Burrow’s visit to Jakarta in 1999. This is not the place to examine the performance of EI. Representing 275 affiliates with a combined membership of 25 million members in all levels of education, EI carries the cause of teacher unionism, educational work and reform of education systems and institutions to the main international fora in labour, education and public finance. As it bases its capitation funding on the GNP of each member’s country, it relies on a dozen national federations to contribute some 85 per cent of its funding. The AEU is one of these ‘key’ financial contributors. The EI leadership in Brussels regards the Union as one of its ‘ideal’ organisations because in its philosophy and behaviour it combines strong professional and trade union attitudes in its approaches to international education. It also relies on the strategic place of the Union in the Asia Pacific area to ‘sell’ the idea of one international union in the region and at the same time encourage moves towards internal cooperation and even unification to countries in the region which are suspicious of the basic principles of trade unionism. (Interview with George Kux, 5 Nov 1997). Within EI, the main internal tensions are not between teachers in the various education sectors, or even differences in political ideologies, but cultural differences derived from religious beliefs and different attitudes towards human rights. The main problem facing EI is that rank and file members in national federations or unions are not easily involved in EI campaigns. EI believes that it will only be a stronger more influential international organisation if and when it can mobilise the grassroots of teacher unionism in the work of EI. As Van Leeuwen observes the rank and file union members must come to appreciate that local education problems in the 1990s (and beyond) cannot be solved locally: ‘globalisation
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of work and education requires globalised solutions’ (Interview with Van Leeuwen, 6 Nov 1997). The Union has been a prominent participant in all Asia Pacific regional meetings and workshops conducted by EI. In the World Congresses held at Harare, Zimbabwe (1995) and Washington, USA (1998) the Union’s delegation (of 14) has been impressive in the way it has influenced both ‘North’ and ‘South’ delegations with its arguments on enhancing EI’s progressive roles in international education politics. Specifically, the Union has been in the forefront of World Congress’ decisions to ensure that women are better represented on EI executive board, that only women sit on its Status of Women committee and that indigenous education issues become a central part of EI’s agenda. Moreover, the Union has won many friends at these meetings by continuing to argue that voting entitlements of affiliates should not be determined by the size of an affiliate’s financial contribution, but by the size of its membership base. It also was effective in persuading the 1998 congress to allow affiliates affected directly by the ‘Asian financial crisis’ to delay their fees payment without penalising their voting entitlements. Even so, the Union’s active presence at World Congresses has not always been conducive to its long-term relationships with its regional counterparts. Its use of urgency resolutions has kept EI focused on East Timor but not without an element of uneasiness from Indonesia’s other neighbours. And at the 1998 congress the Union’s sometimes heavy-handed negotiations on a resolution to protect the rights of lesbian and gay teachers damaged its standing with Pacific Islands and South East Asian delegations, most of whom vehemently, but unsuccessfully, opposed the resolution (International Reports 1996–98). The AEU has been the faithful servant of EI in the implementation of its development projects in the region. The Union has also fully embraced other EI global campaigns such as the effects of globalisation on education or improving the professional status of teachers. Obviously these issues not only have implications for teachers in the region but also within Australia. A less obvious issue for the Union is for elimination of child labour, but here too the Union has embraced the movement. An international campaign sponsored by ILO was established in 1992 and was adopted by EI soon after. Originally it was devised as an action program in developing countries, but the Union (and other western countries) not only financially supported individual programs in these countries, but helped document the re-emergence of the practice in Australia as well
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(AEU, ITF Reports, 1995–98). The EI’s World Congress 1998 established ‘as a top priority for the years 1998–2001’ a comprehensive campaign to eliminate child labour. The Union has decided to approach the Australian government to support and ratify a new ILO convention on child labour (1998) and to use its influence in Asia to support the convention and in particular insist on universal access to basic education as a critical mechanism in the eradication of child labour. The Union has also joined with Community Aid Abroad not only to foster national awareness on the issue, but also to implement joint projects overseas to encourage access to basic education programs. The issue of modern child labour, and EI’s determination to eradicate it by insisting on the universal right to basic education, suggests that at the end of the ‘uncertain century’ teacher unions, international and local, are as committed to social reform as were their predecessors at the turn of the century.
Union records consulted International Trust Fund & Board papers 1982–1989, NBA Z 219 Box 251 ITF Correspondence, AEU file 1.28.1 ITF Minutes, file 1.28.2 ITF Meetings after 1996, files 1.29.2–1.29.13 ITF Reports, 1992 – Federal Conference papers each year. AEU International Reports to the Federal Conferences 1992–. WCOTP/EI correspondence, file 10.2.1 WCOTP/EI circulars, file 10.3.1 WCOTP World Assembly (Stockholm) 1992, file 10.6.2 AEU and individual countries/region: Southern Africa, file 10.100.1 Vietnam, file 10.61.1 and 10.61.2 Nepal, file 10.72.1
9 Reflections One hundred years ago the teacher union in Victoria, in conjunction with the state education department, sponsored the Federal Educational Congress, the first national conference on public education in Australia. Although this was not a union assembly, the union’s president George Carter spoke for teacher unionists, then and afterwards, when he declared that conferences which strengthened ‘the federal spirit’ were important for teachers because ‘we are able to lift ourselves out of the narrow groove in which we are too prone to rest content’ (22 January 1901). Carter and his fellow unionists across Australia could not have dreamt that a century later the ‘federal spirit’ would have been encapsulated in the form of the Australian Education Union. It has become the teacher union that in many of its policies and activities helps lift Australia’s teachers and other education workers ‘out of the narrow groove’ to see their work in national and international perspectives. In a single decade the Union has established itself as the senior partner in the national education industry, and within its own ‘family’, with other education unions and with the ACTU. At the same time, it has continued to be a leader in the national debates on education and training. The fact that its arguments and advocacy are treated with disdain by recent federal governments does not diminish the Union’s standing in the larger education polity. Finally, the AEU has emerged from the shadows of the ATF to become a powerful force in the new international unionism in education, as well as being a respected and generous source of practical assistance to educational development in a number of countries. But, like any Australian union ‘in a contrary world’, the AEU must be in a constant state of renewal. Complacency and compliance will spell the end of its authority and leadership in Australian teacher unionism. Its recognition of this is apparent in the Federal Secretary’s 193
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comment to the January 2000 Federal Conference: ‘Unions are not guaranteed a place in the sun in capitalist societies...’. Even so, there are elements of fatigue emerging in the Union’s search for ways to re-invigorate teacher unionism in Australia. In April 1999 Sharan Burrow was one of a seven-person ACTU delegation that visited Europe and North America to examine how unions have tackled revitalisation in the new work order of globalised capitalism. The ACTU’s Unions at Work report, which stemmed from this visit, is a 10-year plan designed to radically address the problem of declining union membership. The key element is strengthening union activity at the workplace. This ACTU plan effectively ends the ACTU’s industry unionism ‘experiment’. The fact that the Union did not fully embrace this experiment has meant that it has a structural cohesiveness that is solidly based on schools and TAFE institutions without transforming it into a new super-union. This is not to deny that it is no longer interested in amalgamations with some other education unions; indeed in October 1999 it met with the NTEU to plan a discussion paper for members on an AEU/NTEU amalgamation proposal. The Federal Conference in January 2000 devoted considerable energy to workshops and debates, as well as public addresses from the new ACTU secretary and the president of the USA’s National Educational Association, on the issue of union renewal. The conference was prepared to adapt the Unions at Work plan to its own organisation and it has requested all of its branches and sectors (with special attention on an actual experiment in the Northern Territory) to explore ‘a whole of union’ approach which will facilitate a cultural change to activist organisations. This requires a concentrated effort to recruit and retain members, particularly new teachers and teachers in precarious employment as well as the ‘soft’ areas of the industry, such as allied workers, early childhood teachers and principal class members. As women make up the majority within many of these targets, the relevance of the Union and its policies to women has already been emphasised in the release of the Union’s new analysis of women teachers’ work, Building the Foundations of Our Future (1999). The fundamental difference in the organising process now is that teacher union activism is to move away from a union’s central headquarters and visiting industrial officer and shift to the workplace representative. The Federal Conference acknowledged that new internal training processes, the use of mentors for future workplace representatives, the systematic use of local networks of representatives and information technology links to state and federal officers are critical in shifting the loci of activism from unions’ councils and officers to the
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workplace. Finally, the AEU anticipates that this new emphasis on local activism will be sharpened by an expectation of increased local involvement of teacher unions in community politics or ‘social movement unionism’, as the Canadian labour movement calls it. Of course, this has already occurred in several of the NSWTF’s election campaigns, and more recently it was a feature of the Victorian branch’s successful intervention in the October 1999 state election. The difference is that local activism linked to community activism is to become an ongoing strategy and not one reserved only for federal or state election campaigns. Reinvigorating the Union through workplace activism is fraught with potential difficulties because union performance becomes uneven and erratic when left to the workplace activism, as was noted with Victoria’s post-primary unions who had a similar philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s. In essence, it leaves a teacher union at the mercy of local indifference. Moreover, the merits of the strategy must also be seen in the context of two new constraints: an ageing (and battleweary) membership and an overworked profession. Workplace union activism will have to compete against the professional time available to teachers which, in the AEU’s Beyond the Limits (1999) analyses of teachers and TAFE workers ‘running on empty’, implies that these groups have little or no time to devote to any new external demands. This is particularly true of younger teachers who are concerned that it is difficult ‘to get a life’ outside their teaching. This is not to deny the cause of internal reform in the Union. As the Federal Secretary declared at the conference workshop: ‘the time for talking is over; we have to become part of a change process’. One can only agree. If the Union does not attempt this type of organisational reform, it may become one of Peetz’s (1998) non-reconstructed Australian trade unions, which ‘will wither further in face of continuing employer and government opposition and ... likely member indifference to their fate’ (pp. 196–7). Obviously local activists in the Union will expect the national and branches’ offices to participate effectively in the federal and state industrial relations systems. Since the Union accessed the federal system (in all states and territories except New South Wales and Queensland) it has had to face and then accommodate a series of reforms to labour market processes. The moves away from centralised regulation and from conciliation and arbitration since the early 1990s, occurring as they did with the loss of ‘partnership in public education’ between education departments and teacher unions, has forced the Union to become adept in working the reforms to its advantage. In
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general, the Union’s footwork in the federal system has been nimble and sure, but it has not always led to outright success. The Union’s role in navigating the complex jurisdictional issues, more often than not against hostile governmental forces, in a Commission unfamiliar with the work practices and cultures of the new education industry, has been successful. It has obtained federal awards and certified agreements, but it has been an expensive and time-consuming journey for the Union. And the journey is not yet finished. Enterprise bargaining as an industrial reform is grudgingly accepted as the new reality by the Union, even though its original complaint that the manufacturing industry model it represents is inappropriate for ‘mind workers’ still appears justified. The Union and its branches and associated bodies find that enterprise bargaining not only produces intransigent state employers, but also disgruntled members who find little material satisfaction from the bargaining outcomes. As the Union claims: ‘Enterprise bargaining has not been kind to education workers in the government sector’ (Industrial Report to AEU Federal Conference 2000, p. 8). Unions have frequently been forced to accept either productivity trade-offs that have added quantitatively to the already complex and heavy workloads of teachers and others, or in resisting the trade-offs, as they often do, the Union and its constituent members have failed to deliver substantial increases in teachers’ salaries. The Workplace Relations Act imposed even greater emphasis on enterprise bargaining compared with arbitration. However, resort to arbitration, akin to the former ‘special case’ arbitration, remains possible for employees such as teachers who are employed on ‘paid rates’, and where there is no prospect of a certified agreement being reached by collective negotiations. As seen in Chapter 7, the Tasmanian branch of the Union, with the consent of the Tasmanian government, moved to Section 170 MX arbitration to obtain a new salary award in May 1998. During 1999 a major dispute over salaries and working conditions in South Australian preschools, schools and TAFE institutions, the state employers persuaded the AIRC to terminate the bargaining period and move to Section 170 MX arbitration. In the interim, the state branches of the AEU and the Community and Public Sector Union obtained a 4 per cent increase in salaries from the AIRC. The South Australian case, which will be heard throughout 2000, is more complicated than the Tasmanian dispute because the Commission will have to decide whether teachers’ workloads can be determined under these arbitration provisions of the Act. The AEU’s general position is that it now regards bargaining for
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certified agreements as its preferred course of action. But the possibility of Section 170 MX arbitration is a useful addition to its strategies for improving teachers’ employment conditions, especially if the AIRC is as willing to terminate bargaining periods and move to arbitration for the Union as it has been for state employers. Certainly the AEU insists on the primacy of federal certified agreements when state governments attempt to impose industrial workplace agreements on education workers. Accordingly the Union argued that the West Australian Department of Training’s local agreements offered to its 10 TAFE institutes were inconsistent with the Federal Certified Agreement (1996) for TAFE lecturers. In December 1999 the Federal Court ruled that the Western Australian workplace agreements offered in the TAFE institutes could not be validly registered as long as the Federal Certified Agreement covering Western Australian TAFE lecturers remained operable. The other feature of the Workplace Relations Act that has constantly troubled the Union is its awards provisions. These decree that only 20 allowable matters can exist in federal awards and that awards which contain paid-rates scales should be converted to minimum rates. The removal of non-allowable matters from industrial awards – award stripping – is to occur by negotiations or, failing this, by the AIRC after hearing from the parties to the awards. The federal awards for Victorian education workers have faced the most pronounced stripping; matters such as teachers’ rights to be notified about changes to school programs, use of technology, class sizes, unreasonable and excessive workloads and the restricted use of temporary teachers in disability centres were removed from the various awards. Significantly, the new award retained limits to teaching hours maxima following the AIRC’s 1999 finding that their regulation is incidental to an allowable matter, ‘ordinary hours of work’. On the test of converting paid-rates awards to minimum rates, which since October 1998 is to apply to all federal awards, the Union has been able to argue against such conversions in teachers’ and TAFE lecturers’ salaries. It has done so by successfully applying the entitlements structures in nurses’ salaries awards to a TAFE dispute in the ACT. The AIRC found in July 1999 that it was satisfied with the incremental structure in the TAFE lecturers’ salary award because it was based on an accepted form of work-value principles. This decision, claims the AEU, should have a wide application to other federal awards in education, though it may mean that teachers will have to accept annual reviews of their performance to obtain normal incremental progressions.
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Overall, the Union takes some heart that under the Workplace Relations Act its federal awards ‘are currently shivering in a cold climate, but they are not yet frozen’. Access to Section 170 MX arbitration under special circumstances is seen as something of ‘a thaw’, and damage to teachers’ conditions from award stripping ‘has been kept to a minimum’ (Industrial Report to AEU Federal Conference 2000, p. 9). When these experiences are combined with the Union’s use of bargaining with most state and territory employers to maintain federal certified agreements for its members’ employment conditions, then the AEU must be seen as a survivor – so far – of labour market deregulation in Australia. But the Union is extremely apprehensive of the Howard Government’s reforming zeal; it opposed the government’s Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment Bill (June 1999) because the bill proposed to effect nearly one hundred changes to the Workplace Relations Act. These included: further stripping of federal awards; abolition of provisions to provide access to arbitration over disputes involving employees such as teachers on paid-rates; other structural adjustments which would further weaken the conciliation and arbitration powers of the AIRC; further restrictions on the unions’ use of industrial action; and further processes to encourage individual contracts over collective agreements. As was the case with the original Workplace Relations Act during its legislative development, this bill was referred to a Senate Committee inquiry. The ACTU mobilised against the bill and under the personal leadership of its president, Jennie George, cultivated both widespread community and union opposition to the proposed reforms. The AEU was an active partner in this campaign and it made a lengthy submission to, and a personal appearance before, the Senate committee. The campaign could not persuade the government members that the reforms would fail to lead to any significant improvement in labour market regulation, while the ALP Senators readily agreed to reject the bill outright. As in 1996, the ‘balancing decision’ fell to the Democrats who, unlike their 1996 response, declared in the Senate report that ‘most of the bill should be rejected as harsh, unfair, unbalanced and unnecessary’ (Australia, Senate Employment Legislation Committee, 1999, p. 393). In December 1999, after the Democrats’ caucus decided to reject all sections of the proposed legislation, the Minister for Workplace Relations, Peter Reith, announced that he would withdraw the bill from the government’s current legislative program. In June 2000 the ALP and Democrats in the Senate refused to support Reith’s new proposals to eradicate industry-wide collective bargaining. This is
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not the end of the government’s industrial reforms; there is a strong possibility that it might attempt to establish a single national industrial relations system using the Corporations power in the Constitution. The AEU would oppose any such system, not only because the government will use it to abolish the award making roles of the AIRC, but because its two associated bodies, the NSWTF and the QTU, wish to remain regulated by their state industrial systems. The ‘defeat’ of the ‘Reith Second Wave’ bill is one of the few recent public successes of the AEU in the national political arena. Under the Howard Government the Union has become increasingly marginalised as a national influence on public education and the teaching profession. Indeed, the Union finds itself as isolated from federal political processes as its predecessor was in the early 1950s. The difference, however, is significant. Then the ATF had little to contribute to the national polity in education that itself was only emerging. Today the politicisation of education in Australia is in its maturity, and the Union is widely acknowledged as the most articulate and robust voice in national education (Reid, 1998, p. 110). Although the Union continues to advocate sophisticated reforms on a wide range of educational, social and cultural issues, it cannot penetrate government thinking or action. True, the Union finds outlets for its expressions of interest in national parliamentary machinery and public commissions. Hence it has found a definitive voice in the public arenas on the ‘Status of Teachers’ to a Senate inquiry or on teacher shortages forecasts and implications to the Committee of Australian Deans of Education. In more recent submissions (1999) its texts on ‘the GST and Parental Costs in Government Schools’, new trends on the correlates of educational inequality (‘Equity and Education’, a commissioned discussion paper) and its various papers on teachers’ work, including ‘women educators’ experience of pregnancy’, are highly informative as well as valuable in providing solutions and strategies. Yet, like most other earlier submissions, these AEU research publications and arguments quickly gather dust in public and governmental arenas. The Howard Government (but not alone of recent federal governments) sees the AEU as too broad in its range of interests, interests which it claims do not concern the basic membership or the profession. It also claims that when the AEU speaks on specific education issues, it speaks not as the voice of a profession but as the narrower, self-interested voice of teacher trade unionism. This traditional separation of professional/union interests is as much a false dichotomy of union representation as it ever was, but nonetheless it is crudely exploited by the government to sideline the Union. Furthermore, the government
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publicly characterises the Union as having too much influence over the ACTU, the ALP and especially the Federal Opposition and its leader, Kim Beazley. The government’s portrayal of the ‘political’ Union is likely to be embellished by the recent election of Sharan Burrow to the presidency of the ACTU. For its part, the AEU appears to further antagonise the government by insisting that the Federal Minister for Education is a ‘Minister for Nothing’, while the Prime Minister is condemned for his ‘mean-mindedness’ and ‘ordinariness’ (Burrow, President’s opening address to AEU Federal Conference, January 2000). For some years the AEU has seen the Coalition parties’ policies on parental choice, user-pay systems and privatisation as the major threat to public education systems. This is a normal position for the Union to take, given that it is the collective voice of state school and TAFE teachers in the ongoing debate about funding levels to public education. Lately the Union, or at least its national leadership, is alarmed that Prime Minister Howard and his government are supposedly bent on dividing the electorate on social and race issues. In particular, the Union points to the government’s less than enthusiastic attempts to achieve Aboriginal reconciliation. Reconciliation has become almost sacred in the Union’s agenda and its own commitment to it within its governing bodies, its public pronouncements and its sponsorship of it in school activities has been commended by indigenous leaders. But the dilemma for the Union is that to turn vehemently against the government on such issues may be running ahead of the opinions of its rank and file in electorates outside the larger capital cities. In terms of other electoral relationships, the Union is not as enamoured of the federal ALP as it is depicted to be by the Coalition parties. After the policy shambles of the 1998 federal election, the Labor Party will have to make up considerable ground to gain the Union’s confidence. Besides, Labor in government has a particular genius to disappoint those unions and groups committed to advancing public education. Labor’s leader Kim Beazley sounds sympathetic to public education but his ‘Knowledge Nation’ slogan is still only that, and ‘education’ requires much more policy development before it can become attractive to the electorate. The AEU is aware from first-hand observations that the Blair government in the UK and the Clinton administration in the USA also campaigned on the virtues of public education, only to betray it during their terms of office. The AEU also has an uneasy relationship with Labor shadow ministers and most parliamentary backbenchers, who do not seem to appreciate the urgency of the Union’s claim that public education must be rescued
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from its malaise. (This attitude may change if the AEU and the other education unions, who are not Labor affiliates, are able to convince Labor’s federal conference to activate the advancement of public education as a policy and electoral priority.) Some of the AEU’s concerns about Labor’s education policies stem from the hostility of several state membership bodies towards state Labor governments. In New South Wales the Carr government’s policies are dismissed by the union as being an imitation of Blair’s ‘New Labour’ programs in the UK. In the other Labor states, relations between the teacher unions and state governments have not deteriorated as they have in New South Wales. Indeed, the new Labor government in Victoria has endeared itself to the entire teacher union movement by promising to substantially reduce the number of shortterm employment contracts offered to teachers. But Union activists with long memories – the bulk of active members – recall other recent Labor governments’ lack of commitment to public education (Australian Educator, Autumn, No. 25, 2000). The Union still cultivates a solid working relationship with the Democrats in the federal parliament, though this is currently strained by the party’s support for the Goods and Services Tax reforms. Nevertheless, an AEU – Democrat affinity is important to the Union in Senate voting while the party holds the balance of power. Obviously there is not a clear indication of the likely outcomes of the next federal election (to be held in 2001). Even if Labor were to win office (as opinion polls in April and May 2000 suggest) there is a distinct possibility that it will offer only a modest variation to the conservative social politics agenda that currently prevail. As a result, public education will still face the same type of resources problems that it experienced for most of the 1990s. If a Coalition government is returned to office the Union can expect more of the same treatment it has endured from the federal government since 1996. Too long in the wilderness can seriously undermine the vitality and robustness of even the hardiest of organisations and without these in national politics the AEU can quickly lose credibility among its branches. It would seem then that the AEU, having anchored its position as a major trade union in the federal industrial relations system and in regional international cooperation in education, needs urgently to address its political strategies in national education. Based on its past performances, the Union ‘will not rest content’, but rise to the challenge. Failure to do so will not only imperil the Union’s reputation as a progressive teacher union, but also that of Australia as a progressive nation.
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Australian Industrial Relations Commission decisions
References ATF/AEU Series (held in FEUIC) Australian TAFE Teacher, Vol.1, 1969– Australian Education, No.1, 1993– Australian Teacher, 1982–92 and ATF Action Circulars, 1981–86 NBA Z219, Boxes 103, 111–12, 230 ATF Background Notes, 1986–89 NBA Z219, Boxes 211, 214–15 ATF/AEU ‘Policy Handbook’ (1983–96) ATF/AEU Reports of Annual Conferences, 1966AEU Industrial Brief 1997– and ACTU Reports and Papers, 1978– Education International Annual Reports, 1992– Education International, 1992– WCOTP, Annual Reports, 1953–91 (WCOTP) Echo, 1980–92
Published law reports CLR = Commonwealth Law Reports IR = Industrial Reports (of Industrial Arbitration Service) High Court of Australia decisions (1908) 6 CLR 309 Jumbanna Coal Mine No Liability v Victorian Coal Miners Association & ors (1929) 41 CLR 569 Federated State School Teachers’ Assoc. of Australia v Victoria & ors (1983) 153 CLR 297 R v Coldham; ex parte ASWU (1986) 160 CLR 430 Re Lee; ex parte Harper (1995) 184 CLR 188 Re Australian Education Union & ors; ex parte Victoria
(1996) 187 CLR 416 Victoria v Commonwealth
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(1988) 25 IR 406 Re Teachers Association of Australia (1991) 40 IR 458 ACTTF & ors v ACT Schools Authority & ors (1992) 46 IR 22 Minister for Education of Victoria v ATU (1992) 46 IR 371 ATU v Minister for Education of Victoria & ors (1994) 56 IR 1 Re Teachers’ (Victorian Government Schools Interim) Award 1993 (1995) 61 IR 174 Minister for Education of Victoria v AEU (1996) 69 IR 288 Re Teachers’ (Victorian Government Schools) Conditions of Employment Award 1995 (1997) 73 IR 118 Re Teachers’ (Victorian Government Schools) Conditions of Employment Award 1995 (1997) 74 IR 218 Minister for Education for Victoria v AEU (1997) 76 IR 1 Re Victorian Teachers’ Redundancy Award 1994 (1998) 86 IR 441 Re Teachers’ (Victorian Government Schools) Conditions of Employment Award 1995
AIRC print decisions (unpublished) – chronological K5742 Decision to find dispute in Tasmania and Victoria (1 December 1992) K9642 Decision to find dispute in all states and territories, reserved for Queensland, NSW and WA government teachers (20 October 1993) K9692 Decision to find dispute in TAFE in ACT, NT, SA and Victoria (29 October 1993) L0454 Decision to make Interim Award for Victorian government school teachers’ salaries and conditions, excluding principals (15 December 1993) K9931 Decision to make Disability Services Award Victoria 1993 (21 December 1993) L3494 Decision on hours and leave loading in Victorian TAFE Interim Award (23 May 1994) L3846 Decision (FB) to make Victorian Teachers’ Redundancy Award 1992 (17 June 1994) L5018 Decision to direct AEU and NT Teaching Service Commissioner to confer on Relief Teachers’ rates (31 August 1994) L5810 Decision to refuse AEU application for interim award in SA (12 October 1994) L5892 Decision (FB) to dismiss government appeal against TAFE decision 24 May 1994 (19 October 1994) L6539 Decision to make Teachers’ (Victorian Government Schools Selection and Appointment Award 1994 (3 November 1994) L8138 Decision to make Teachers’ (VGS) Interim Award No.2 (21 December 1994) L8276 Order (FB) to quash Teachers’ [VGS] Selection and Appointment award (23 December 1994) L8274 Decision (FB) to vary VGS Teachers’ Interim Award 1994 to include workload provisions (24 February 1995)
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Australian Industrial Relations Commission decisions
References ATF/AEU Series (held in FEUIC) Australian TAFE Teacher, Vol.1, 1969– Australian Education, No.1, 1993– Australian Teacher, 1982–92 and ATF Action Circulars, 1981–86 NBA Z219, Boxes 103, 111–12, 230 ATF Background Notes, 1986–89 NBA Z219, Boxes 211, 214–15 ATF/AEU ‘Policy Handbook’ (1983–96) ATF/AEU Reports of Annual Conferences, 1966AEU Industrial Brief 1997– and ACTU Reports and Papers, 1978– Education International Annual Reports, 1992– Education International, 1992– WCOTP, Annual Reports, 1953–91 (WCOTP) Echo, 1980–92
Published law reports CLR = Commonwealth Law Reports IR = Industrial Reports (of Industrial Arbitration Service) High Court of Australia decisions (1908) 6 CLR 309 Jumbanna Coal Mine No Liability v Victorian Coal Miners Association & ors (1929) 41 CLR 569 Federated State School Teachers’ Assoc. of Australia v Victoria & ors (1983) 153 CLR 297 R v Coldham; ex parte ASWU (1986) 160 CLR 430 Re Lee; ex parte Harper (1995) 184 CLR 188 Re Australian Education Union & ors; ex parte Victoria
(1996) 187 CLR 416 Victoria v Commonwealth
202
(1988) 25 IR 406 Re Teachers Association of Australia (1991) 40 IR 458 ACTTF & ors v ACT Schools Authority & ors (1992) 46 IR 22 Minister for Education of Victoria v ATU (1992) 46 IR 371 ATU v Minister for Education of Victoria & ors (1994) 56 IR 1 Re Teachers’ (Victorian Government Schools Interim) Award 1993 (1995) 61 IR 174 Minister for Education of Victoria v AEU (1996) 69 IR 288 Re Teachers’ (Victorian Government Schools) Conditions of Employment Award 1995 (1997) 73 IR 118 Re Teachers’ (Victorian Government Schools) Conditions of Employment Award 1995 (1997) 74 IR 218 Minister for Education for Victoria v AEU (1997) 76 IR 1 Re Victorian Teachers’ Redundancy Award 1994 (1998) 86 IR 441 Re Teachers’ (Victorian Government Schools) Conditions of Employment Award 1995
AIRC print decisions (unpublished) – chronological K5742 Decision to find dispute in Tasmania and Victoria (1 December 1992) K9642 Decision to find dispute in all states and territories, reserved for Queensland, NSW and WA government teachers (20 October 1993) K9692 Decision to find dispute in TAFE in ACT, NT, SA and Victoria (29 October 1993) L0454 Decision to make Interim Award for Victorian government school teachers’ salaries and conditions, excluding principals (15 December 1993) K9931 Decision to make Disability Services Award Victoria 1993 (21 December 1993) L3494 Decision on hours and leave loading in Victorian TAFE Interim Award (23 May 1994) L3846 Decision (FB) to make Victorian Teachers’ Redundancy Award 1992 (17 June 1994) L5018 Decision to direct AEU and NT Teaching Service Commissioner to confer on Relief Teachers’ rates (31 August 1994) L5810 Decision to refuse AEU application for interim award in SA (12 October 1994) L5892 Decision (FB) to dismiss government appeal against TAFE decision 24 May 1994 (19 October 1994) L6539 Decision to make Teachers’ (Victorian Government Schools Selection and Appointment Award 1994 (3 November 1994) L8138 Decision to make Teachers’ (VGS) Interim Award No.2 (21 December 1994) L8276 Order (FB) to quash Teachers’ [VGS] Selection and Appointment award (23 December 1994) L8274 Decision (FB) to vary VGS Teachers’ Interim Award 1994 to include workload provisions (24 February 1995)
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M7299 Decision to refuse SA and WA governments’ applications to refrain from AIRC hearing for teachers’ awards (30 November 1995) M9263 Decision dismissing SA and WA appeals on decision of 30 November 1995 (12 February 1996) N2940 Decision (FB) to vary VGS Teachers’ Conditions of Employment Award re salaries and career structure (5 July 1996) N6795 Decision to award AEU joint coverage of allied staff and AIEWs, excluding NSW and ACT (26 November 1996) N9074 Decision (FB) to refuse SA and WA governments leave to appeal on decisions of Mr Justice Munro (4 March 1997) L3637 Decision to ban threatened industrial action over LAP tests (14 March 1997) M3410 Decision (FB) on implied limitations and Commonwealth’s legislative power in relation to VGS selection of appointment, promotion and transfer of teachers (16 April 1998) Q0785 Decision (FB) on Section 170MX arbitration and Tasmanian government school teachers and principals’ salaries (18 May 1998) Q5598 Decision (FB) varying Victorian TAFE teachers’ salaries and classifications (9 September 1998) Q6318 Decision to find ‘allowable’ a number of workload regulations in Teachers’ (VGS) Conditions of Employment Award 1995 (18 September 1998) S0785 Decision to register Victorian Principals Federation (16 November 1999)
Other references Anderson, D. (1998). New strategies for new times: Rethinking TAFE teachers and teacher unionism. Sydney: Public Sector Research Centre, University of New South Wales. Angus, M. (1996). Award restructuring in schools: Educational idealism versus political pragmatism. In T. Seddon (Ed.), Pay, professionalism and politics: Reforming teaching, reforming education (pp. 117–52). Camberwell: Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). Australia, Senate Employment, Education and training References Committee. (1998). A class act. Inquiry into the status of the teaching profession. Canberra: Senate Printing Unit. Australia, Senate Employment, Workplace Relations, Small Business and Education Legislation Committee. (1999). Consideration of the provisions of the Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (More jobs, better pay) Bill 1999. Canberra: Senate Printing Unit. Baldwin, G., & Sharpe, F. (1996). Teacher Award restructuring in New South Wales. In T. Seddon (Ed.), Pay, professionalism and politics: Reforming teaching, reforming education (pp. 51–86). Camberwell: ACER. Barber, M. (1992). Education and the teacher unions. London: Cassell.
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Bascia, N. (1998). The next steps in teacher union and reform. Contemporary Education, 69(4), 210–13. Bean, C. (Ed.). (1994). Federal Election 1993 [Special issue]. Australian Journal of Political Science, 29(4). Bean, C. (Ed.). (1997). The politics of retribution: The 1996 federal election. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Bluer, R. (1990). Teacher unionism at the national level. The Australian Teachers Federation, 1982–1990. (Unpublished manuscript, copy with A.D. Spaull.) Bulbeck, C. (Ed.). (1997). Living feminism. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Burrow, S. (1996). Award restructuring – The teaching profession. In T. Seddon (Ed.), Pay, professionalism and politics: Reforming teaching, reforming education (pp. 87–116). Camberwell: ACER. Burrow, S., & Martin, R. (1998). Speaking up for public education workers – The AEU in hard times. In A. Reid (Ed.), Going public: Education policy and public education in Australia (pp. 97–104). Canberra: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Camilleri, J. (1993). The federal election. Arena Magazine, No. 3, 19–20. Chaison, G.N. (1996). Union mergers in hard times: The view from five countries. Ithaca NY: ILR Press. Clements, M.A. (1996). The national curriculum in Australia. Education Research and Perspectives, 23(1), 61–92. Connell, R.W. (1985). Teachers’ work. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Connell, R.W. (1995). Transformative labour. Theorizing the politics of teachers’ work. In M. Ginsburg (Ed.), The politics of educators’ work and lives (pp. 91–114). New York: Garland Publishing. Connors, L. (1992). ‘Fightback’ and the schools. Australian Quarterly, 62(2), 82–97. Dawkins, J., & Costello, R. (1983). Education progress and equality. In J. Reeves & K. Thompson (Eds.), Labor essays (pp. 67–79). Melbourne: Dove Publications. Durbridge, R. (1991). Restructuring in the schools sector. Unicorn, 17(2), 85–90. Essential Media Communications (EMC). (1998, April). Federal education issues and voting intentions. Fitzroy: EMC. Gahan, P. (1996). Did arbitration make for dependent unionism? Journal of Industrial Relations, 38(4), 648–98. Gardner, M. (1989). Union strategy: A gap in union theory. In B. Ford & D. Plowman (Eds.), Australian unions – An industrial relations perspective (pp. 49–72). Melbourne: Macmillan. Griffin, G., & Guica, V. (1986). One union peak council: The merger of ACSPA and CAGEO with the ACTU, Journal of Industrial Relations, 28(4), 483–503. Griffin, G., Svensen, S., & Teicher, J. (1997). Trade union non-industrial services: Membership attitudes. Labour and Industry, 7(3), 31–41.
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M7299 Decision to refuse SA and WA governments’ applications to refrain from AIRC hearing for teachers’ awards (30 November 1995) M9263 Decision dismissing SA and WA appeals on decision of 30 November 1995 (12 February 1996) N2940 Decision (FB) to vary VGS Teachers’ Conditions of Employment Award re salaries and career structure (5 July 1996) N6795 Decision to award AEU joint coverage of allied staff and AIEWs, excluding NSW and ACT (26 November 1996) N9074 Decision (FB) to refuse SA and WA governments leave to appeal on decisions of Mr Justice Munro (4 March 1997) L3637 Decision to ban threatened industrial action over LAP tests (14 March 1997) M3410 Decision (FB) on implied limitations and Commonwealth’s legislative power in relation to VGS selection of appointment, promotion and transfer of teachers (16 April 1998) Q0785 Decision (FB) on Section 170MX arbitration and Tasmanian government school teachers and principals’ salaries (18 May 1998) Q5598 Decision (FB) varying Victorian TAFE teachers’ salaries and classifications (9 September 1998) Q6318 Decision to find ‘allowable’ a number of workload regulations in Teachers’ (VGS) Conditions of Employment Award 1995 (18 September 1998) S0785 Decision to register Victorian Principals Federation (16 November 1999)
Other references Anderson, D. (1998). New strategies for new times: Rethinking TAFE teachers and teacher unionism. Sydney: Public Sector Research Centre, University of New South Wales. Angus, M. (1996). Award restructuring in schools: Educational idealism versus political pragmatism. In T. Seddon (Ed.), Pay, professionalism and politics: Reforming teaching, reforming education (pp. 117–52). Camberwell: Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). Australia, Senate Employment, Education and training References Committee. (1998). A class act. Inquiry into the status of the teaching profession. Canberra: Senate Printing Unit. Australia, Senate Employment, Workplace Relations, Small Business and Education Legislation Committee. (1999). Consideration of the provisions of the Workplace Relations Legislation Amendment (More jobs, better pay) Bill 1999. Canberra: Senate Printing Unit. Baldwin, G., & Sharpe, F. (1996). Teacher Award restructuring in New South Wales. In T. Seddon (Ed.), Pay, professionalism and politics: Reforming teaching, reforming education (pp. 51–86). Camberwell: ACER. Barber, M. (1992). Education and the teacher unions. London: Cassell.
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Bascia, N. (1998). The next steps in teacher union and reform. Contemporary Education, 69(4), 210–13. Bean, C. (Ed.). (1994). Federal Election 1993 [Special issue]. Australian Journal of Political Science, 29(4). Bean, C. (Ed.). (1997). The politics of retribution: The 1996 federal election. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Bluer, R. (1990). Teacher unionism at the national level. The Australian Teachers Federation, 1982–1990. (Unpublished manuscript, copy with A.D. Spaull.) Bulbeck, C. (Ed.). (1997). Living feminism. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Burrow, S. (1996). Award restructuring – The teaching profession. In T. Seddon (Ed.), Pay, professionalism and politics: Reforming teaching, reforming education (pp. 87–116). Camberwell: ACER. Burrow, S., & Martin, R. (1998). Speaking up for public education workers – The AEU in hard times. In A. Reid (Ed.), Going public: Education policy and public education in Australia (pp. 97–104). Canberra: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Camilleri, J. (1993). The federal election. Arena Magazine, No. 3, 19–20. Chaison, G.N. (1996). Union mergers in hard times: The view from five countries. Ithaca NY: ILR Press. Clements, M.A. (1996). The national curriculum in Australia. Education Research and Perspectives, 23(1), 61–92. Connell, R.W. (1985). Teachers’ work. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Connell, R.W. (1995). Transformative labour. Theorizing the politics of teachers’ work. In M. Ginsburg (Ed.), The politics of educators’ work and lives (pp. 91–114). New York: Garland Publishing. Connors, L. (1992). ‘Fightback’ and the schools. Australian Quarterly, 62(2), 82–97. Dawkins, J., & Costello, R. (1983). Education progress and equality. In J. Reeves & K. Thompson (Eds.), Labor essays (pp. 67–79). Melbourne: Dove Publications. Durbridge, R. (1991). Restructuring in the schools sector. Unicorn, 17(2), 85–90. Essential Media Communications (EMC). (1998, April). Federal education issues and voting intentions. Fitzroy: EMC. Gahan, P. (1996). Did arbitration make for dependent unionism? Journal of Industrial Relations, 38(4), 648–98. Gardner, M. (1989). Union strategy: A gap in union theory. In B. Ford & D. Plowman (Eds.), Australian unions – An industrial relations perspective (pp. 49–72). Melbourne: Macmillan. Griffin, G., & Guica, V. (1986). One union peak council: The merger of ACSPA and CAGEO with the ACTU, Journal of Industrial Relations, 28(4), 483–503. Griffin, G., Svensen, S., & Teicher, J. (1997). Trade union non-industrial services: Membership attitudes. Labour and Industry, 7(3), 31–41.
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Harken, E.J. (1989). The federal registration of the Australian Teachers Union. Unpublished master’s report, Murdoch University, Australia. The International Federation of Free Trade Unions (IFFTU). (1993). The International Federation of Free Trade Unions 1926–1993. Amsterdam: IFFTU. Kelly, J., & Waddington, J. (1995). New prospects for British labour. Organisation, 2(3 & 4), 415–26. Kerchner, C.T., & Mitchell, D. (1988). The changing idea of a teachers’ union. Lewes: The Falmer Press. Kilby, P. (Ed.). (1996). Australia’s aid program. Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute and Community Aid Abroad. Lawn, M. (1996). Modern times? Work, professionalism and citizenship in teaching. London: The Falmer Press. Lieberman, M. (1997). The teacher unions. New York: The Free Press. Lingard, R., Porter, P., Bartlett, L., & Knight, R. (1993). Strengthening Australia’s schools through corporate federalism. Australian Journal of Education, 37(3), 231–47. Lingard, R., Porter, P., Bartlett, L., & Knight, R. (1995). Federal/state mediations in the Australian national education agenda (1987–1993). Australian Journal of Education, 39(1), 41–66. McCallum, R.C. (1984). ‘Jones and Laughlin Steel downunder’: New directions in Australian Federal Labor law. Comparative Labor Law, 6, 94–108. McCollow, J.E. (1996). Emancipatory, elitist or irrelevant? FAUSA and the collective organisation of Australian academics 1952–1993. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Queensland, Australia. McGaw, B. (1998). Politicising the standards debate. ACER Newsletter, No. 92, 10–11. Marsh, C.J. (1995). Producing a national curriculum. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Martin, R.M. (1980). Trade unions in Australia. Ringwood: Penguin. Martin, R.M. (1989). Trade unionism – Purposes and forms. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Morrow, A., Blackburn, J., & Gill, J. (1998). In A. Reid (Ed.), Going public: Education policy and public education in Australia (pp. 10–20). Canberra: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Office of the Joint Committee of International Teachers Federation (JCITF). (1959). The Joint committee of International Teachers Federation. Paris: JCIFT. Peetz, D. (1998). Unions in a contrary world. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Preston, B. (1995). The Australian Teaching Council and the teacher unions. Curriculum Perspectives, 15(2), 29–40. Preston, B. (1996). Award restructuring: A catalyst in the evolution of teacher professionalism? In T. Seddon (Ed.), Pay, professionalism and politics (pp. 153–202). Camberwell: ACER. Preston, B. (1997). A national teaching profession? In R. Lingard & P. Porter (Eds.), A national approach to schooling in Australia (pp. 76–94). Canberra: Australian College of Education.
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Porter, R. (1987). The establishment of the ATU as distinct from the ATF. Graduate Diploma of Employment Relations Report, New South Wales Institute of Technology. Prosser, S., & Starr, G. (Eds.). (1997). Policy and change: The Howard mandate. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger. Provis, C. (1996). Organisational theory, unions and politics. In G. Griffin (Ed.), Contemporary research on unions: Theory, membership, organisation and nonstandard employment (Vol.1) (pp. 1–18). Melbourne: National Key Centre for Industrial Relations. Rawson, D.W. (1986). Unions and unionists in Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Reid, A.R. (1997). Controlling teachers: A labour process analysis of teachers’ work in South Australia. Unpublished PhD thesis, The Flinders University, South Australia. Reid, A.R. (Ed.). (1998). Going public: Education policy and public education in Australia. Canberra: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Seddon, T., Angus, L., & Brown, L. (1998). Remaking public education: After a nation-building state changes its mind. In A. Reid (Ed.), Going public: Education policy and public education in Australia (pp. 77–87). Canberra: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Shute, C. (1994). Unequal partners. In N. Grieve & A. Burns (Eds.), Australian women: A new feminist perspective (pp. 166–79). Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Singleton, J., Martyn, P., & Ward, I. (1998). Did the 1996 federal election see a blue-collar revolt against Labor? Australian Journal of Political Science, 33(1), 117–30. Spaull, A.D. (1984). The origins and formation of teacher unions in 19th century Australia. Melbourne Studies in Education, 136–68. Spaull, A.D. (Ed.). (1986). Teacher unionism in the 1980s: Four perspectives. Hawthorn: ACER. Spaull, A.D. (1987). The state school teachers’ decision (High Court 1929) revisited. Australian Journal of Education, 31(3), 236–51. Spaull, A.D. (1989). The establishment of a national teachers’ federation in Australia 1921–1937. History of Education Review, 19(1), 2–42. Spaull, A.D. (1990). Is there a new teacher unionism? Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association, Boston. Spaull, A.D. (1992). Federal registration of Australia’s teachers’ unions. Australian Journal of Labor Law, 5(1), 40–51. Spaull, A.D. (1997a). ‘A law unto themselves’: Victorian state school teachers and the Federal Labour Power. Discourse, 18(2), 185–6. Spaull, A.D. (1997b). Deprofessionalisation of state school teaching: A Victorian industrial relations saga. Australian Journal of Education, 41(3), 289–303.
206
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Harken, E.J. (1989). The federal registration of the Australian Teachers Union. Unpublished master’s report, Murdoch University, Australia. The International Federation of Free Trade Unions (IFFTU). (1993). The International Federation of Free Trade Unions 1926–1993. Amsterdam: IFFTU. Kelly, J., & Waddington, J. (1995). New prospects for British labour. Organisation, 2(3 & 4), 415–26. Kerchner, C.T., & Mitchell, D. (1988). The changing idea of a teachers’ union. Lewes: The Falmer Press. Kilby, P. (Ed.). (1996). Australia’s aid program. Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute and Community Aid Abroad. Lawn, M. (1996). Modern times? Work, professionalism and citizenship in teaching. London: The Falmer Press. Lieberman, M. (1997). The teacher unions. New York: The Free Press. Lingard, R., Porter, P., Bartlett, L., & Knight, R. (1993). Strengthening Australia’s schools through corporate federalism. Australian Journal of Education, 37(3), 231–47. Lingard, R., Porter, P., Bartlett, L., & Knight, R. (1995). Federal/state mediations in the Australian national education agenda (1987–1993). Australian Journal of Education, 39(1), 41–66. McCallum, R.C. (1984). ‘Jones and Laughlin Steel downunder’: New directions in Australian Federal Labor law. Comparative Labor Law, 6, 94–108. McCollow, J.E. (1996). Emancipatory, elitist or irrelevant? FAUSA and the collective organisation of Australian academics 1952–1993. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Queensland, Australia. McGaw, B. (1998). Politicising the standards debate. ACER Newsletter, No. 92, 10–11. Marsh, C.J. (1995). Producing a national curriculum. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Martin, R.M. (1980). Trade unions in Australia. Ringwood: Penguin. Martin, R.M. (1989). Trade unionism – Purposes and forms. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Morrow, A., Blackburn, J., & Gill, J. (1998). In A. Reid (Ed.), Going public: Education policy and public education in Australia (pp. 10–20). Canberra: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Office of the Joint Committee of International Teachers Federation (JCITF). (1959). The Joint committee of International Teachers Federation. Paris: JCIFT. Peetz, D. (1998). Unions in a contrary world. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Preston, B. (1995). The Australian Teaching Council and the teacher unions. Curriculum Perspectives, 15(2), 29–40. Preston, B. (1996). Award restructuring: A catalyst in the evolution of teacher professionalism? In T. Seddon (Ed.), Pay, professionalism and politics (pp. 153–202). Camberwell: ACER. Preston, B. (1997). A national teaching profession? In R. Lingard & P. Porter (Eds.), A national approach to schooling in Australia (pp. 76–94). Canberra: Australian College of Education.
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207
Porter, R. (1987). The establishment of the ATU as distinct from the ATF. Graduate Diploma of Employment Relations Report, New South Wales Institute of Technology. Prosser, S., & Starr, G. (Eds.). (1997). Policy and change: The Howard mandate. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger. Provis, C. (1996). Organisational theory, unions and politics. In G. Griffin (Ed.), Contemporary research on unions: Theory, membership, organisation and nonstandard employment (Vol.1) (pp. 1–18). Melbourne: National Key Centre for Industrial Relations. Rawson, D.W. (1986). Unions and unionists in Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Reid, A.R. (1997). Controlling teachers: A labour process analysis of teachers’ work in South Australia. Unpublished PhD thesis, The Flinders University, South Australia. Reid, A.R. (Ed.). (1998). Going public: Education policy and public education in Australia. Canberra: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Seddon, T., Angus, L., & Brown, L. (1998). Remaking public education: After a nation-building state changes its mind. In A. Reid (Ed.), Going public: Education policy and public education in Australia (pp. 77–87). Canberra: Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Shute, C. (1994). Unequal partners. In N. Grieve & A. Burns (Eds.), Australian women: A new feminist perspective (pp. 166–79). Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Singleton, J., Martyn, P., & Ward, I. (1998). Did the 1996 federal election see a blue-collar revolt against Labor? Australian Journal of Political Science, 33(1), 117–30. Spaull, A.D. (1984). The origins and formation of teacher unions in 19th century Australia. Melbourne Studies in Education, 136–68. Spaull, A.D. (Ed.). (1986). Teacher unionism in the 1980s: Four perspectives. Hawthorn: ACER. Spaull, A.D. (1987). The state school teachers’ decision (High Court 1929) revisited. Australian Journal of Education, 31(3), 236–51. Spaull, A.D. (1989). The establishment of a national teachers’ federation in Australia 1921–1937. History of Education Review, 19(1), 2–42. Spaull, A.D. (1990). Is there a new teacher unionism? Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the American Educational Research Association, Boston. Spaull, A.D. (1992). Federal registration of Australia’s teachers’ unions. Australian Journal of Labor Law, 5(1), 40–51. Spaull, A.D. (1997a). ‘A law unto themselves’: Victorian state school teachers and the Federal Labour Power. Discourse, 18(2), 185–6. Spaull, A.D. (1997b). Deprofessionalisation of state school teaching: A Victorian industrial relations saga. Australian Journal of Education, 41(3), 289–303.
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Spaull, A.D. (1998). The AEU and union modernization. Contemporary Education, 69(4), 204–09. Spaull, A.D. (1999). The end of the state school system? In B. Costar & N. Economou (Eds.), The Kennett revolution (pp. 214–24). Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Spaull, A.D., & Hince, K. (1986). Industrial relations and state education in Australia. Melbourne: Australian Education Press. Thompson, J. (1969). International teacher organizations. In A.A. Blum (Ed.), Teacher unions and associations (pp. 333–48). Urbana: University of Illinios Press. Turtle, A., Seymour, B., Anley, B., Barnard, R., & Gilbert K. (1984). Women’s participation in the New South Wales Teachers Federation. Journal of Industrial Relations, 26(4), 451–71. van de Vall, M. (1970). Labor organisations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Voll, G.R. (1997). Time’s up for TUTA – A corporatist casualty. Labour and Industry, 8(2), 85–99. White, D. (1993). An election story. Arena Magazine, No. 4, 5–6. White, R.D. (1984). Teachers as state workers and the politics of professionalism. Unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra. Williams, P. (1997). Victory. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Index For explanations of many of the acronyms used in this index, please consult pages ix–x. Centre for Education and Training Futures 56, 143 defining and owning decisions 6164 early childhood education policy 50 electoral campaigns 134-35, 137-38, 144-46, 162-65 electronic mail system 53 federal conference in 1995 144 in 1996 162-63 in 1997 63-64, 162 and FEU joint building 44 future directions 194-95 and international education and trade unionism 169-71, 176-77, 181-85, 190-92 and non-government school teachers 42 provision of non-industrial services to members 57-59 records and sources consulted for this book 15, 38, 68, 86, 117-18, 147, 168, 192 second federal office 64 ‘strategic planning day’ 61, 64 trainee organisers scheme 55-56, 84 as a voice in politics 119-21, 199 Afghanistan 170 AIEWs 46, 81-83 and AEU ‘Claiming Our Place’ conference 84 AIRC and federal awards
abbreviations ix-x Aboriginal reconciliation movement 80-81, 83, 86, 200 Aboriginals see AIEWs; indigenous issues Accord, Labor government-ACTU Prices and Income 5, 17, 21, 88, 124, 132 acronyms ix-x ACSPA and ATF 3-4 ACTTF and NTTF 25, 37 and proposed new federal union 10 ACTU see also specific areas of interest, organisations and unions and AEU 16 and ATF 3-4, 17, 21, 89 declining union membership 194 first education conference conducted by 4 ‘Organising Works’ 55 ranking unions policy 41 and TAA 25 and teacher unions 3 and TUTA 56 Union Training Scheme 56 Unions at Work 194 ADAB 178 Advanced Skills Teacher classification 94-95 AEU see also ATF; ATU; indigenous issues; specific areas of interest, teacher organisations and unions; women entries and ATF 119
209
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Spaull, A.D. (1998). The AEU and union modernization. Contemporary Education, 69(4), 204–09. Spaull, A.D. (1999). The end of the state school system? In B. Costar & N. Economou (Eds.), The Kennett revolution (pp. 214–24). Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Spaull, A.D., & Hince, K. (1986). Industrial relations and state education in Australia. Melbourne: Australian Education Press. Thompson, J. (1969). International teacher organizations. In A.A. Blum (Ed.), Teacher unions and associations (pp. 333–48). Urbana: University of Illinios Press. Turtle, A., Seymour, B., Anley, B., Barnard, R., & Gilbert K. (1984). Women’s participation in the New South Wales Teachers Federation. Journal of Industrial Relations, 26(4), 451–71. van de Vall, M. (1970). Labor organisations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Voll, G.R. (1997). Time’s up for TUTA – A corporatist casualty. Labour and Industry, 8(2), 85–99. White, D. (1993). An election story. Arena Magazine, No. 4, 5–6. White, R.D. (1984). Teachers as state workers and the politics of professionalism. Unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra. Williams, P. (1997). Victory. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Index For explanations of many of the acronyms used in this index, please consult pages ix–x. Centre for Education and Training Futures 56, 143 defining and owning decisions 6164 early childhood education policy 50 electoral campaigns 134-35, 137-38, 144-46, 162-65 electronic mail system 53 federal conference in 1995 144 in 1996 162-63 in 1997 63-64, 162 and FEU joint building 44 future directions 194-95 and international education and trade unionism 169-71, 176-77, 181-85, 190-92 and non-government school teachers 42 provision of non-industrial services to members 57-59 records and sources consulted for this book 15, 38, 68, 86, 117-18, 147, 168, 192 second federal office 64 ‘strategic planning day’ 61, 64 trainee organisers scheme 55-56, 84 as a voice in politics 119-21, 199 Afghanistan 170 AIEWs 46, 81-83 and AEU ‘Claiming Our Place’ conference 84 AIRC and federal awards
abbreviations ix-x Aboriginal reconciliation movement 80-81, 83, 86, 200 Aboriginals see AIEWs; indigenous issues Accord, Labor government-ACTU Prices and Income 5, 17, 21, 88, 124, 132 acronyms ix-x ACSPA and ATF 3-4 ACTTF and NTTF 25, 37 and proposed new federal union 10 ACTU see also specific areas of interest, organisations and unions and AEU 16 and ATF 3-4, 17, 21, 89 declining union membership 194 first education conference conducted by 4 ‘Organising Works’ 55 ranking unions policy 41 and TAA 25 and teacher unions 3 and TUTA 56 Union Training Scheme 56 Unions at Work 194 ADAB 178 Advanced Skills Teacher classification 94-95 AEU see also ATF; ATU; indigenous issues; specific areas of interest, teacher organisations and unions; women entries and ATF 119
209
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on portability of entitlements 98-101 for teachers 114-16, 150-51, 15356, 197 and industrial teacher action in Victoria 153 Alliance of Concerned Teachers 179-80 ALP (Australian Labor Party) 164, 16668, 200-201 see also specific governments America Central and Latin 178 North 186 APHEDA 181, 183 arbitration 150-51, 155-56, 195-96 Asian Pacific Economic Council 185 ATASA (African Teachers Association of South Africa) 181 ATC 131, 159 ATF see also specific areas of interest, organisations and unions cost cutting 26 electoral campaigns 122-23, 125 International Cooperation Program 171 and international policy 169-81, 186-89 lack of a political voice 121-24, 199 move to Melbourne 17-18 ATF (1984-92) see also AEU; ATU; specific areas, people, teacher unions and unions of interest and federal Labor governments 5-9, 16-17 ATSI education workers see AIEWs; indigenous issues ATU 11, 189 see also AEU; ATF; specific state and territory teacher organisations and unions central task 28 cost cutting 26 and KTAV merger 43, 46, 48-50 registration 15 as replacement for ATF 18-19, 21, 23-25, 37-38 TAFE division in 25, 35 Australian Democrats 145-46, 151-52, 156, 164, 166, 198, 201 Australian Educator journal 55 Australian Teaching Council (ATC) 140-41 Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) 151-53
REFERENCES ‘Australia’s Teachers: An Agenda for the Next Decade’ 128 award restructuring 26, 93-98 see also federal awards AWAs (Australian Workplace Agreements) see also Workplace Relations Act (WRA) 1996 (Cwlth) Banikoff, Alexia 179 Beazley, Kim 139-40, 142, 164, 166, 200 Bevis, Arch 19 Blair government 200-201 Bluer, Robert 18-24, 75, 94, 125 Brown Liberal government 112 Burma 170, 184 Burrow, Sharan 22, 119, 144, 184, 189, 194, 200 Cain Labor government 11, 102 Cambodia 170, 184 Cameron, Clyde 84 Canadian Teachers Federation 171, 173, 177, 189 Carr government 201 Carter, George 193 Catholic schools 166 certified agreements, federal 196-97 child labour 191-92 neglect 144 Chile 179 China 175 class sizes 154 Clinton administration 200 collective bargaining 149, 153 Commonwealth Powers (Industrial Relations) Act 1996 (Vic) 152 community activism 195 Community Aid Abroad 192 competency framework 130-31 Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 5, 15 Corbett, Joan 30 Costello, Ray 126 Council of Pacific Teachers Organisations 179-80 Court Coalition Government 113, 149 CPSU 45 Creating an Education Nation 144 Davy, Van 21-22, 123 Dawkins, John 126-27, 129, 132-33 de Teix, Jacqueline 179 disadvantage, educational 159
discount system, national 59 Durbridge, Rob 22, 87, 93-94, 97-98, 111-12, 168, 183 East Timor 3, 170, 183-84, 189-90 Ebert, Leonie 180 economic justice 83 economic rationalism 126 ‘EdEmploy’ 59 ‘EdSuper’ 60 Education International (EI) project 183-84, 190-91 ‘Education Partnership, The’ 124 EDUSAVE 59 Elimination of Sexism in Education and Employment Policy (1988) 31 England 170, 200-201 Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment 160, 164 enterprise bargaining 71, 100-101, 105, 156, 195 factionalism 67 FAUSA 15 federal awards see also award restructuring for kindergarten teachers 49, 108 on portability of entitlements 98102 for school teachers 6, 9, 19, 21, 23, 50, 83, 91-93, 109-11, 115-17, 136, 150-59, 197 for university and college academics 15, 34, 107-8 Federated Clerk’s Association 15 Federated State School Teachers’ Association of Australia v. Victoria ORS (1929) 6-7, 9, 13 feminism 33, 70-71 see also women entries FEU 41, 43-44 ‘Fightback’ 136-37 Fiji 170, 173, 179-80, 185 Foggo, Di 18-19, 24, 31, 42, 88 Fowler, Pat 33, 85 France 188 Fraser government 3-4, 76, 87, 122 Free, Ross 139 FSSTAA 2 and federal industrial awards 6 FTUV 28 and VSTA 48 Futrell, Mary 189
211
gay teachers 191 gender equity see women entries George, Jennie 4, 29, 198 Germany, West 170 globalisation 163, 177, 185, 190 Goods and Services Tax 133, 138, 165, 201 Greens 146 Greiner Coalition government 92, 13536 grievance procedures 154 Gulf War 170 Hansonism, (Pauline) 81, 165 Harare Accord (1988) 181 Harris, Robert 174, 176, 187-88 Hawke, R.J. (Bob) 3, 80, 123 Hawke Labor government 5, 16-17, 32, 56, 79-81, 88, 123-32, 134-35, 177 Hewitt, Rex 20 Hewson, John 133-34 higher education sector see also TAFE; TAFETA under John Dawkins 127 as one industry 41-42 Howard, John 125, 148-50, 200 Howard Liberal-National Coalition government 73, 75, 90, 118, 145-46, 148-68, 198-99 human rights 170, 180-81 humanitarian aid 177 ICFTU 186, 189 IFFTU 187-88 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 170 immigrants 33 Independents 146, 166 India 185 indigenous issues see also AIEWs and ACTU 78 and AEU 75-86 and ATF 76 in teacher unions/organisations 18 and women 33-34 Indonesia 174, 184, 189-90, 1179 Industrial Relations Act 1988 (Cwlth) 27, 41, 66, 102, 106, 114, 153 amendments 103 Industrial Relations Act 1972 (SA) 112 Industrial Relations Act 1984 (Tas) 111 Industrial Relations Reform Act 1993 (Cwlth) 100 insurance, personal 59
210
THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
on portability of entitlements 98-101 for teachers 114-16, 150-51, 15356, 197 and industrial teacher action in Victoria 153 Alliance of Concerned Teachers 179-80 ALP (Australian Labor Party) 164, 16668, 200-201 see also specific governments America Central and Latin 178 North 186 APHEDA 181, 183 arbitration 150-51, 155-56, 195-96 Asian Pacific Economic Council 185 ATASA (African Teachers Association of South Africa) 181 ATC 131, 159 ATF see also specific areas of interest, organisations and unions cost cutting 26 electoral campaigns 122-23, 125 International Cooperation Program 171 and international policy 169-81, 186-89 lack of a political voice 121-24, 199 move to Melbourne 17-18 ATF (1984-92) see also AEU; ATU; specific areas, people, teacher unions and unions of interest and federal Labor governments 5-9, 16-17 ATSI education workers see AIEWs; indigenous issues ATU 11, 189 see also AEU; ATF; specific state and territory teacher organisations and unions central task 28 cost cutting 26 and KTAV merger 43, 46, 48-50 registration 15 as replacement for ATF 18-19, 21, 23-25, 37-38 TAFE division in 25, 35 Australian Democrats 145-46, 151-52, 156, 164, 166, 198, 201 Australian Educator journal 55 Australian Teaching Council (ATC) 140-41 Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) 151-53
REFERENCES ‘Australia’s Teachers: An Agenda for the Next Decade’ 128 award restructuring 26, 93-98 see also federal awards AWAs (Australian Workplace Agreements) see also Workplace Relations Act (WRA) 1996 (Cwlth) Banikoff, Alexia 179 Beazley, Kim 139-40, 142, 164, 166, 200 Bevis, Arch 19 Blair government 200-201 Bluer, Robert 18-24, 75, 94, 125 Brown Liberal government 112 Burma 170, 184 Burrow, Sharan 22, 119, 144, 184, 189, 194, 200 Cain Labor government 11, 102 Cambodia 170, 184 Cameron, Clyde 84 Canadian Teachers Federation 171, 173, 177, 189 Carr government 201 Carter, George 193 Catholic schools 166 certified agreements, federal 196-97 child labour 191-92 neglect 144 Chile 179 China 175 class sizes 154 Clinton administration 200 collective bargaining 149, 153 Commonwealth Powers (Industrial Relations) Act 1996 (Vic) 152 community activism 195 Community Aid Abroad 192 competency framework 130-31 Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 5, 15 Corbett, Joan 30 Costello, Ray 126 Council of Pacific Teachers Organisations 179-80 Court Coalition Government 113, 149 CPSU 45 Creating an Education Nation 144 Davy, Van 21-22, 123 Dawkins, John 126-27, 129, 132-33 de Teix, Jacqueline 179 disadvantage, educational 159
discount system, national 59 Durbridge, Rob 22, 87, 93-94, 97-98, 111-12, 168, 183 East Timor 3, 170, 183-84, 189-90 Ebert, Leonie 180 economic justice 83 economic rationalism 126 ‘EdEmploy’ 59 ‘EdSuper’ 60 Education International (EI) project 183-84, 190-91 ‘Education Partnership, The’ 124 EDUSAVE 59 Elimination of Sexism in Education and Employment Policy (1988) 31 England 170, 200-201 Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment 160, 164 enterprise bargaining 71, 100-101, 105, 156, 195 factionalism 67 FAUSA 15 federal awards see also award restructuring for kindergarten teachers 49, 108 on portability of entitlements 98102 for school teachers 6, 9, 19, 21, 23, 50, 83, 91-93, 109-11, 115-17, 136, 150-59, 197 for university and college academics 15, 34, 107-8 Federated Clerk’s Association 15 Federated State School Teachers’ Association of Australia v. Victoria ORS (1929) 6-7, 9, 13 feminism 33, 70-71 see also women entries FEU 41, 43-44 ‘Fightback’ 136-37 Fiji 170, 173, 179-80, 185 Foggo, Di 18-19, 24, 31, 42, 88 Fowler, Pat 33, 85 France 188 Fraser government 3-4, 76, 87, 122 Free, Ross 139 FSSTAA 2 and federal industrial awards 6 FTUV 28 and VSTA 48 Futrell, Mary 189
211
gay teachers 191 gender equity see women entries George, Jennie 4, 29, 198 Germany, West 170 globalisation 163, 177, 185, 190 Goods and Services Tax 133, 138, 165, 201 Greens 146 Greiner Coalition government 92, 13536 grievance procedures 154 Gulf War 170 Hansonism, (Pauline) 81, 165 Harare Accord (1988) 181 Harris, Robert 174, 176, 187-88 Hawke, R.J. (Bob) 3, 80, 123 Hawke Labor government 5, 16-17, 32, 56, 79-81, 88, 123-32, 134-35, 177 Hewitt, Rex 20 Hewson, John 133-34 higher education sector see also TAFE; TAFETA under John Dawkins 127 as one industry 41-42 Howard, John 125, 148-50, 200 Howard Liberal-National Coalition government 73, 75, 90, 118, 145-46, 148-68, 198-99 human rights 170, 180-81 humanitarian aid 177 ICFTU 186, 189 IFFTU 187-88 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 170 immigrants 33 Independents 146, 166 India 185 indigenous issues see also AIEWs and ACTU 78 and AEU 75-86 and ATF 76 in teacher unions/organisations 18 and women 33-34 Indonesia 174, 184, 189-90, 1179 Industrial Relations Act 1988 (Cwlth) 27, 41, 66, 102, 106, 114, 153 amendments 103 Industrial Relations Act 1972 (SA) 112 Industrial Relations Act 1984 (Tas) 111 Industrial Relations Reform Act 1993 (Cwlth) 100 insurance, personal 59
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
International teacher unionism see also specific countries, organisations and unions history 185-92 International Teachers’ Day 141 International Trust Fund of ATF/AEU 177-85 International Women’s Year, 1975 29 International Year of Peace (1986) International Year of World’s Indigenous People (1993) 84 Iraq 170 Israel 170, 181 ITF (or ITFA) and FEU 42-43 and federal union 10 in Victoria 28 Jackson Committee 177 Japan 170, 174, 179 Jumbanna Coal Mine v. Victorian Coal Miners Association (1908) 5, 7, 9 Kanaky independence movement 179 Keating, Paul 136-38, 143 Keating Labor government 80, 102, 106, 110, 132-33, 144-45 second 139-47 Kelly, Mary 140 Kelty, Bill 39, 41, 88-89 Kemp, David 159 Kennett Coalition government 48, 102, 104, 136, 149, 154 Korean Teachers Union 183 KTAV 28, 43 Kuwait 170 LAP (Learning Assessment Project) 153 Latham, Mark 166 Lawrence, Tony 42, 109 Lee, Patrick 183 lesbian teachers 191 ‘literacy crisis’ 160, 166 local activism 195 Malaysia 174, 185 Marginson, Simon 8, 23 McGregor, Helen 20 Munro, Mr Justice 114-16, 150 ‘National Claim Framework’ 158 National Curriculum/Professional Issues Forum in 1994 54
REFERENCES National Policy for Education of Girls (1987) 32 National Policy on Women’s Health (1988) 32 ‘National Project on the Quality of Teaching’ 129 NBEET 142 and ACTU 127 Nepal 170, 182 Netherlands 181 NETUV (National Educational Trade Union of Vietnam) 183 New Caledonia 170 independence movement 179 New Zealand 173-74, 179 Nicaragua 180 Nigeria Union of Teachers 171 NNTA (Nepal National Teachers Association) 182 non-government schools state aid to 122-24, 133, 159-60 Northern Territory see also NTTF relief teachers 109 NPQTL (‘National Project on the Quality of Teaching and Learning’) 129-32, 140, 159 NSN (National Schools Network) 139, 141, 159 NSWTF and ACTU 3 and ATF 23, 25, 34 and Carr government 201 and ‘EdSuper’ 60 electoral campaigns 135-37 and federal awards 19-22, 92 and indigenous issues 76-77 and international concerns 169 and registration of ATU 11-12, 15 regulated by state industrial system 199 and TAFE sector 35 teacher employment services 59 and women 29 NTEU 42, 45, 194 NTFU and AEU 44 NTTF see also Northern Territory and ACTTF 25, 37 and ATF 23 decline in membership 179 and indigenous issues 77 and Industrial Relations Bill 1988 24 and proposed new federal union 10 and TAFE sector 36-37
O’Connor, Justice 5-6 ‘One Nation’ 81 Palestinians 170, 181 Papua New Guinea Teachers Association 171, 179 PGRI 179, 184, 189 Philippines 170, 174, 179, 183 portability of entitlements 92, 98-102 principals, school 50 see also VPF professional development 128 Professional Development Program, National 141 ‘Project Overseas’ scheme 171 Public Service Union 45 QPOA 36 QTU and ATF 23 and federal awards 20 interest in federal awards 91 regulated by state industrial system 199 and TAFETA 36 and women 31 quality of teaching movement 128 Racial Discrimination Act 86 racism 76 Re Australian Education Union (1995) case 104-6 redundancy 102-3, 106-7 refugee support 180, 184 registration federal teachers’ organisation 6, 9-10, 14 teacher 141, 158 regulation 195 Reith, Peter 150, 198-99 relief teachers 109 reproductive technology policy 32 retrenchment 103 Robson, David (Dave) 24, 42 Ryan, Senator Susan 17, 123, 125-26 SADTU (South African Democratic Teachers Union) 181-82 SAIT see also South Australia and ATF 4 and indigenous issues 76, 82 salaries, teachers’ 26, 87-93, 110, 11213, 143, 150, 152-58, 196-97 see Accord; award restructuring; feder-
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al awards benchmarks 94, 96, 98, 156-57 Santamaria, B.A. 11 school principals 50 see also VPF staff, non-teaching 45 teachers see specific areas of interest, organisations and unions schooling, primary 142, 144 sex-based harassment in schools 72 Shanker, Al 187 Singapore 174 Sky Channel national TV hook-up in March 1990 97 Smith, Greg 22 Social Welfare Union case (1982, 1983) 8-9 ATF’s response to 9-15 South Africa 170, 181-83, 187 South Australia see also SAIT and federal awards for teachers 115, 196 piecemeal teacher salary approach 110, 112-13 South Korea 170, 183 Soviet bloc European countries 186-87 Soviet Union 189 SPSF 41 SSTUWA see also Western Australia deregistration 114 difficulties with AEU 64-67 difficulties with ATU 27 and industrial action in schools 113-14 and Mr Justice Munro 116 Strengthening Australian Schools 127-28 superannuation, industry 59-60 Sweden 173, 177, 183, 187 Switzerland 187, 189 TAA and ACTU 25 formation 11 and registration 10, 13-14 TAFE see also higher education sector award in Victoria 107-8, 155-56 colleges 34-36, 161, 197 and ‘EdSuper’ 60 division in ATU 25, 35 TAFETA and ATF 25, 34 and proposed new federal union 10, 34-36
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
International teacher unionism see also specific countries, organisations and unions history 185-92 International Teachers’ Day 141 International Trust Fund of ATF/AEU 177-85 International Women’s Year, 1975 29 International Year of Peace (1986) International Year of World’s Indigenous People (1993) 84 Iraq 170 Israel 170, 181 ITF (or ITFA) and FEU 42-43 and federal union 10 in Victoria 28 Jackson Committee 177 Japan 170, 174, 179 Jumbanna Coal Mine v. Victorian Coal Miners Association (1908) 5, 7, 9 Kanaky independence movement 179 Keating, Paul 136-38, 143 Keating Labor government 80, 102, 106, 110, 132-33, 144-45 second 139-47 Kelly, Mary 140 Kelty, Bill 39, 41, 88-89 Kemp, David 159 Kennett Coalition government 48, 102, 104, 136, 149, 154 Korean Teachers Union 183 KTAV 28, 43 Kuwait 170 LAP (Learning Assessment Project) 153 Latham, Mark 166 Lawrence, Tony 42, 109 Lee, Patrick 183 lesbian teachers 191 ‘literacy crisis’ 160, 166 local activism 195 Malaysia 174, 185 Marginson, Simon 8, 23 McGregor, Helen 20 Munro, Mr Justice 114-16, 150 ‘National Claim Framework’ 158 National Curriculum/Professional Issues Forum in 1994 54
REFERENCES National Policy for Education of Girls (1987) 32 National Policy on Women’s Health (1988) 32 ‘National Project on the Quality of Teaching’ 129 NBEET 142 and ACTU 127 Nepal 170, 182 Netherlands 181 NETUV (National Educational Trade Union of Vietnam) 183 New Caledonia 170 independence movement 179 New Zealand 173-74, 179 Nicaragua 180 Nigeria Union of Teachers 171 NNTA (Nepal National Teachers Association) 182 non-government schools state aid to 122-24, 133, 159-60 Northern Territory see also NTTF relief teachers 109 NPQTL (‘National Project on the Quality of Teaching and Learning’) 129-32, 140, 159 NSN (National Schools Network) 139, 141, 159 NSWTF and ACTU 3 and ATF 23, 25, 34 and Carr government 201 and ‘EdSuper’ 60 electoral campaigns 135-37 and federal awards 19-22, 92 and indigenous issues 76-77 and international concerns 169 and registration of ATU 11-12, 15 regulated by state industrial system 199 and TAFE sector 35 teacher employment services 59 and women 29 NTEU 42, 45, 194 NTFU and AEU 44 NTTF see also Northern Territory and ACTTF 25, 37 and ATF 23 decline in membership 179 and indigenous issues 77 and Industrial Relations Bill 1988 24 and proposed new federal union 10 and TAFE sector 36-37
O’Connor, Justice 5-6 ‘One Nation’ 81 Palestinians 170, 181 Papua New Guinea Teachers Association 171, 179 PGRI 179, 184, 189 Philippines 170, 174, 179, 183 portability of entitlements 92, 98-102 principals, school 50 see also VPF professional development 128 Professional Development Program, National 141 ‘Project Overseas’ scheme 171 Public Service Union 45 QPOA 36 QTU and ATF 23 and federal awards 20 interest in federal awards 91 regulated by state industrial system 199 and TAFETA 36 and women 31 quality of teaching movement 128 Racial Discrimination Act 86 racism 76 Re Australian Education Union (1995) case 104-6 redundancy 102-3, 106-7 refugee support 180, 184 registration federal teachers’ organisation 6, 9-10, 14 teacher 141, 158 regulation 195 Reith, Peter 150, 198-99 relief teachers 109 reproductive technology policy 32 retrenchment 103 Robson, David (Dave) 24, 42 Ryan, Senator Susan 17, 123, 125-26 SADTU (South African Democratic Teachers Union) 181-82 SAIT see also South Australia and ATF 4 and indigenous issues 76, 82 salaries, teachers’ 26, 87-93, 110, 11213, 143, 150, 152-58, 196-97 see Accord; award restructuring; feder-
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al awards benchmarks 94, 96, 98, 156-57 Santamaria, B.A. 11 school principals 50 see also VPF staff, non-teaching 45 teachers see specific areas of interest, organisations and unions schooling, primary 142, 144 sex-based harassment in schools 72 Shanker, Al 187 Singapore 174 Sky Channel national TV hook-up in March 1990 97 Smith, Greg 22 Social Welfare Union case (1982, 1983) 8-9 ATF’s response to 9-15 South Africa 170, 181-83, 187 South Australia see also SAIT and federal awards for teachers 115, 196 piecemeal teacher salary approach 110, 112-13 South Korea 170, 183 Soviet bloc European countries 186-87 Soviet Union 189 SPSF 41 SSTUWA see also Western Australia deregistration 114 difficulties with AEU 64-67 difficulties with ATU 27 and industrial action in schools 113-14 and Mr Justice Munro 116 Strengthening Australian Schools 127-28 superannuation, industry 59-60 Sweden 173, 177, 183, 187 Switzerland 187, 189 TAA and ACTU 25 formation 11 and registration 10, 13-14 TAFE see also higher education sector award in Victoria 107-8, 155-56 colleges 34-36, 161, 197 and ‘EdSuper’ 60 division in ATU 25, 35 TAFETA and ATF 25, 34 and proposed new federal union 10, 34-36
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THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION UNION
Tanzania 181 Tasmania see also TTF and federal awards 110-11, 156-57, 196 piecemeal teacher salary approach 110 teacher unions fragmentation in 47 teacher appointments, transfers and promotions 153-54 Teacher Quality (1989) 128 teacher union see also ACTU; specific unions division of state and federal responsibilities 54 factionalism 67 membership decline 52 rationalisation 40-41, 44, 51 relevancy to members 40, 194 teachers see specific organisation or union Teachers’ Award 154-55 ‘Teachers Charter’ 5 Teaching Accord (1993) 139-40, 142 teaching conditions 143, 150, 153-54, 157-58, 195 see also salaries, teachers’ teaching hours 154-55 teleconferences 62 Thomas, Greg 180 Thompson, John 172, 187 Tickell, Gerry 170 Tonga 180 TTF and AEU 47 and ATF 4, 10, 23 TTU, interest in federal awards 91-92 TTUV 28 and ACTU 3 TUTA 56 and indigenous issues 80, 83-86
unions see ACTU; teacher union Van Leeuwen, Fred 169, 189-90 VAT (now called VATF) 11 VATF and TAA 11 Victoria see also federal awards; FTUV; ITF; KTAV; TTUV; VSTA; VTU education and Bracks Labor government 201 electoral campaigning 154, 167 higher education teachers 107-8
industrial relations powers 152 kindergarten teachers 108 school teachers’ disputes in 102-7, 153-54 Schools of the Future project 149 strikes 153 teacher union politics in 46-48 Victoria and others v. The Commonwealth (1996) 106-7 Vietnam 170, 175, 180, 183 VPF and AEU 50-51 and federal awards for teachers 50 and government liaison 50 registration as a federal union 51 VSTA 27-28 and ACTU 3 VTU 27-28 wages see Accord; award restructuring; federal awards; salaries, teachers’ Walsham, Richard 61, 66, 173, 182 WCOTP 2-3, 79, 85, 170-83, 186-89 Weir, Margot 76-77 Western Australia 50 see also SSTUWA and federal awards for teachers 115 piecemeal teacher salary approach 110, 113 Whitlam Labor government 2, 121-22 women and ACTU 32 in AEU 70-75 federal conference of 1997 75 in overseas education programs 184-85 in teacher/education unions 29, 178-79, 189, 194 women’s issues and immigrants 33 and indigenous peoples 33–34 in teachers’ unions/organisations 12-13, 18, 20, 25, 29-34 workload of classroom teachers, increase in 57, 154, 195-96 workplace agreements 113, 154 Workplace Agreements Act 1993 (WA) 113 Workplace Relations Act (WRA) 1996 (Cwlth) 149-59, 196-98 World Bank 170
