New South Wales teachers held meetings across the state on February 6 to consider a settlement on salaries and staffing negotiated by the NSW Teachers Federation.
The meetings consisted of a pre-recorded explanation of the settlement by the senior officers of the NSWTF and a debate and vote on endorsement of the settlement.
Approximately 97% of teachers voted to endorse the settlement.
The NSWTF has been waging a campaign to reinstate a centralised staffing system since the last staffing agreement lapsed at the end of term one, 2008 and the Department of Education and Training (DET) refused to negotiate a new one.
This move by DET meant the effective dismantling of the service transfer system, which rewarded teachers who agree to work in hard-to-staff areas with transfer points, making it easier for them to relocate to their area of choice after several years.
Though the system was still technically in place, the new arrangement meant principals could ignore the service transfer list and go straight to open advertisement if they wished.
Importantly, the centralised transfer system also guaranteed that all students and all schools in NSW were allocated qualified teachers.
The award for NSW teachers had also expired on December 31 and DET had made an insulting offer of a series of outrageous cuts to conditions in return for any salary increase higher than 2.5%. Such trade-offs included slashing sick leave, reducing workers' compensation, and reducing access to other forms of leave.
On November 19 last year, teachers had voted to reject the offer and strike for 48 hours in the first school week of 2009.
But after the negotiation of the settlements over the summer school holidays, the strikes did not go ahead.
The negotiated salary settlement is for a 12.48% pay rise over three years: 4.4% in January 2009, 3.8% in January 2010 and 3.8% in January 2011. There were some concessions, but they were not as severe as the ambit claim submitted by DET in 2008.
For example, sick leave was reduced to 15 full days a year instead of the 10 days originally proposed by DET. As the new salaries agreement will expire after the next state election, this could possibly reduce the ability of NSWTF to bargain and take political action in support of the next agreement.
Historically, when agreements have expired before state elections, unions have been in a better position to apply
political pressure to the government when seeking new agreements.
While the negotiation of a new staffing agreement is a significant achievement for public education in NSW, the new agreement includes some very negative aspects and in fact represents a 50% deregulation of the staffing system.
While the service transfer system is reinstated, the new staffing agreement only requires that every second vacancy in a school be filled by service transfers or higher priority transfers (for example, compassionate transfers). If each such second vacancy is not filled by such higher priority transfers, then principals have the option to openly advertise the position and interview for the job.
This means that it will be much harder (and take longer) for teachers to transfer to their areas of choice after serving in hard-to-staff areas.
This in turn will mean teachers hesitate to accept appointments in such areas, and students will ultimately suffer a lack of qualified teachers.
The second major fault of the new staffing agreement is that interview panels for teacher positions no longer need to have a union representative. The previous agreement mandated such union representation.
The new agreement merely requires that a teacher representative be a member of interview panels, which is not the same thing as a union representative. This represents a real loss of power for the NSWTF.
Overall, it is likely that a more favourable settlement could have been achieved with a more militant campaign — particularly proceeding with the proposed 48-hour strike for the first school week of 2009.
[Pat Donohoe is a vice president of Canterbury-Bankstown Teachers Association, a member of the NSWTF Council and a Socialist Alliance activist.]