Catholic Bargaining in Victoria: time for progress and parity

Bargaining has been occurring each week for new Agreements to replace the Victorian Catholic Education Multi-Enterprise Agreement (VCMEA) 2018. These negotiations will determine the salaries and working conditions or staff in Catholic schools for the next few years.

The Sale Diocese is negotiating separately, so we will have three agreements covering Catholic schools in Victoria:

• One for the Sale Diocese and Catholic College Sale

• One for Xavier College

• One for all the other Catholic Schools in Victoria, including the Diocese of Melbourne, Sandhurst, and Ballarat and all the order schools.

While we’ve had around 45 meetings with Catholic employers and have been pushing to get this done at a reasonable rate, progress has been slower than we would like. The most significant recent development has been the in-principle Agreement between the AEU and Victorian Government announced on 4 February, which is expected to be approved by AEU members in coming weeks (see our analysis, next page). While the Victorian Government Schools Agreement (VGSA) will not cover IEU members, it sets a new benchmark in our bargaining with Victorian Catholic employers and the IEU is at the table to ensure that our members are not left behind.

No wins will be simply handed down to IEU members. There is still a lot of hard bargaining to be done before our Agreements will be ready for member approval.

What now?

The IEU will work through our claims as well as those of employer representatives. Some of the employer claims involve crude cuts to hard-won conditions – these we will fight hard to oppose. Others are procedural and probably able to be accommodated if the overall offer is good enough.

We also need to carefully consider the conditions won by the AEU. It's important to note that some of the workload wins for teachers in the VGSA are premised on a different approach to that of previous Victorian Catholic Education Agreements. As just one example, while it contains stricter limits around employer-directed duties and activities during the school day, the VGSA does not grant the right to leave the school campus which is afforded to teachers under the IEU-negotiated Agreement covering Catholic schools. To help guide our approach, we recently surveyed teachers working in Victorian Catholic schools around workload issues – see breakout box.

We will continue meeting with employer representatives over the coming weeks and try to hammer out the best deal we can as soon as possible, and we will report back to members as the Agreements take shape.

In the meantime, the stronger we are in schools, the better the outcome is likely to be.  Active members need to be talking about these issues and encouraging staff to join us to get the best possible conditions in our schools. Non-members need to understand that there is no such thing as a free ride: not joining the IEU reduces our strength and our ability to deliver the best Agreements.

Over decades of negotiations and members campaigning, we’ve been able to successfully maintain teacher pay parity and directly comparable conditions and salaries for Education Support Staff, Principals and Assistant Principals in Victorian Catholic schools. We’ve also achieved salaries and conditions in many independent schools that are competitive with or better than the benchmark set in government schools. But we cannot take these past achievements for granted – our ability to win comes directly from our collective strength. We must continue to grow, stand together and campaign together.

Now is the time for staff in the sector to get behind our campaign to ensure that we aren’t left behind. 

Snap Teacher Workload Survey Results

On 10 March, we circulated a snap workload survey to IEU-member teachers in Victorian Catholic schools as we sought to prioritise our claims relating to teacher workloads.

With 2000 results within 24 hours, it was a really useful snapshot of teacher workload pressures – as well as your perspectives on possible solutions.

Of the six categories of non-classroom-related-work we asked about, you told us that before- and after-school meetings were the most time-consuming – full-time teachers in both primary and secondary told us that these on average chew up more than 2.5 hours out of each week. The next most time-consuming task for primary teachers was NCCD-related work (which we hope our recent win will assist with, see article on p. 4), while for secondary teachers it was out-of-hours contact with parents and students.

Of the potential solutions to workload pressures we surveyed you on, the top-ranked was ‘measures to reduce administrative burdens’. This is unsurprising, but also a particularly challenging one to tackle in Agreements. Our negotiators will do what they can on this at the bargaining table, but it is also an issue which we address through empowered Consultative Committees and through our work engaging with policy makers and educational authorities. Amongst the next most popular solutions were time-off-in-lieu for out-of-hours activities, caps on meetings, and reduced class sizes. Also highly-ranked were reductions in face-to-face teaching time and greater autonomy within the school day.

Our survey also received around 800 ‘free text’ responses, many quite detailed, which we have been going through carefully.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate in this snap survey – it has greatly assisted us in prioritising our claims at this critical point in bargaining.