From The Point: David Brear, General Secretary on IEU strategic planning
Your newspaper The Point is hitting letterboxes as we speak. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing cherry-picked highlights from the publication online. You can also view the full publication at: https://www.ieuvictas.org.au/member-publications
Planning for better outcomes for members
Over the past few months we have begun developing our new strategic plan, a process vital for the future of our union.
This hefty task began with a facilitated meeting involving all staff and all the members of the Committee of Management. Committee of Management is the ultimate decision-making body of the IEU and is made up of elected Reps and members from independent and Catholic schools across Victoria and Tasmania.
In this first meeting we discussed where we are as an organisation and where we needed to be, the effectiveness of what we are currently doing and what we need to focus on going forward.
This led to more discussion around how we need to be structured and how we need to plan to optimise our effectiveness.
What we know already is that a very significant amount of the work we do involves supporting individual members who are dealing with often complex and confronting issues at work. The introduction of the Reportable Conduct Scheme in Victoria added considerably to this to industrial workload. Similar legislation now also in place is Tasmania.
Negotiating Enterprise Bargaining Agreements in independent schools is also resource intensive and the IEU has over 100 EBAs in place across two states.
Then there’s the negotiation of the Agreements covering Victorian and Tasmanian Catholic schools, which are huge undertakings involving thousands of members across many schools.
The IEU won significant improvements to conditions in the recent Victorian Catholic Agreements, including a one-and-a-half-hour reduction of scheduled teaching time and the abolition of extras. However, workload remains a major issue.
And we’re also aware that everyone is feeling the pinch right now with the cost of living – so campaigning for meaningful wage increases is also a top priority for our forward planning.
With IEU members facing big challenges to win necessary improvement to wages and conditions, we must ensure we are a fighting fit organising and campaigning union whilst continuing the important work of looking after the day-to-day legal and industrial needs of our members.
That’s why we’re taking this chance to examine how we run. To win for members we must continue to build power and that means campaigning around key issues like pay, workload, parental leave, superannuation, and better classification structures for Education Support Staff.
The goal of our strategic plan is to review what and how we do these things – to sharpen up so we can be the best union possible for every member across Victoria and Tasmania.