Denis Matson on the IEU’s campaign in Tasmania, 2014

Former IEU Senior Industrial Officer Denis Matson is a veteran of bargaining stoushes across the union movement. He helped spearhead the 2014 Tasmanian Catholic school campaign and still has the beanies to prove it!

If I learnt two things from the 2014 Tasmanian Catholic education EBA campaign, they were:

1. Don’t run a campaign in Tasmania in the middle of winter

2. Tasmanian IEU members can change the course of history.

Denis Matson - without beanie or jacket - during a rally in Tasmania, 2014.

I will never forget standing in the freezing cold outside St Mary’s College in Hobart in the midst of winter in the early morning in 2014. We had called for a strike and a rally and had no idea if anyone would actually turn up. It was like that hour before your party starts: Will anybody come? Maybe I have no real friends? Only there was a lot more riding on this.

For 200 years the Tasmanian Catholic Education Office (TCEO) had ruled the roost. There had never been a strike in Catholic education in Tasmania. The bosses knew they had the upper hand and, no matter how just or fair our claim was, the TCEO were confident they could refuse it. They were confident that any move to strike would be a flop and their lawyers kept assuring them that the laws were on their side.

As a few people started to arrive, the air didn’t warm up, but my optimism did. The trickle of people arriving with smiles and banners turned into a stream, and one of my colleagues said that a TCEO IR staffer was watching us from a car over the road. Not wishing to be rude, I strode over towards him to welcome him to what was becoming a sizeable crowd, but he sped off before I could knock on his window. I’m sure that the message he took back to the TCEO was that the crowd of strikers was quite a bit larger than they had anticipated.

But the message that was really being sent was more significant: Catholic teachers and support staff supported the union’s claim – and they were prepared to fight. At meetings and stoppages all over the state, members turned out in big numbers.

Perhaps the greatest honour went to the many primary teachers who took action. The TCEO had conceded most of the claims affecting them, so they weren’t striking for their own claims, but they fought as hard as anyone, backing in their support staff. That feeling of solidarity with colleagues built a campaign as strong as anything I had seen in my years of industrial battles in the building and manufacturing industries.

Within weeks the Director of Catholic Education and the IR Director had both resigned. They had made two fatal errors: listening to their lawyers and underestimating how brave and determined their staff were.

As the strikes rolled around the state, and the media showed footage of members rallying, chanting and relishing the challenge, the wheels fell off at the TCEO. Their hierarchy took to putting out threats in videos and on TV, which only served to anger school staff even more.

I could say that the absolute highlight was getting the phone call from the new IR manager who was appointed to make peace with the Union. Or the day we finally reached agreement, including winning all of the claims members had fought for.

But actually, my favourite moment came at a time when we were still very much doubting whether we could win the dispute. I was at one of our stop-work meetings that was so full that I was left standing with members at the back of the room. As we moved out of the meeting the TV cameras wanted some footage for the nightly news. Without waiting to be asked, dozens of members banded together, put their fists in the air and started to chant. The cameras lapped it up, and from behind the TV crews I looked into the faces of the chanting crowd: they were ENJOYING IT!

Right then I knew we would win and I learnt that Tasmanian IEU members could change the course of history. And they did.