The Workload Agreement: Why you should vote Yes
It’s been a long and very challenging process, but finally we have a draft Agreement ready for your consideration. Here is why your union is strongly urging members (and non-members!) in Victorian Catholic schools to vote in favour of the proposed Agreement.
Lengthy negotiations and the tireless campaigning of IEU members – especially during their innovative No More Freebies campaign last year – have won many important improvements.
Most notable of these is a fundamental overhaul of workloads in schools, which gives us a new foundation to build upon for years to come through Consultative Committees and future rounds of bargaining. We fought hard for this because workloads have reached crisis levels, leading to escalating levels of burnout and stress and undermining the delivery of quality education for our students.
Something had to be done about this – and this Agreement delivers in spades.
This Agreement:
Achieves an historic shift in the way the work of teachers is regulated and valued, introducing a hugely important new model for managing workloads
Reduces Scheduled Class Time for teachers by one hour this year and a further half-hour next year
Ensures that all staff have access to Time in Lieu for directed out-of-hours work, at last putting a value on the essential work done outside of the school day.
Better regulates teacher working hours through the ‘30 plus 8 model’, providing teachers with more autonomy and control over their time during the school day
Introduces big improvements to parental leave provisions (including a quadrupling of paid partner leave) and important measures to tackle the gender pay gap
Maintains pay parity with staff in Victorian government schools
Improves Education Support Staff classification structures and offers big salary increases to our lowest-paid colleagues
Limits before- and after-school meetings to two hours per week
Strengthens workplace consultation with new ‘deadlock-breaking’ measures and paid training leave for staff and IEU reps on Consultative Committees
Contains commitments to better manage workloads, deal more efficiently administrative burdens and limit ‘spread-of-hours’ for part-time staff
Improves many other conditions, from the introduction of ‘flexible leave’ to stronger redundancy and Accident Make Up Pay entitlements
Make no mistake – this is big! In fact, it is the biggest overhaul of workloads in decades.
We know there have been and will continue to be ‘teething issues’ with the implementation of all this change. There will be ongoing work required of IEU Organisers, Reps, those sitting on Consultative Committees, school leaders, and of every member, who we are relying on to actively support this change.
(Of course, if you are non-member reading this then there is one critical thing YOU can do right now to help propel this positive change – join the IEU at www.ieuvictas.org.au/join!)
But it’s worth every effort to bed this Agreement down and get it right - these changes are vital, and they are way overdue.
And the best way to start?
A really strong ‘yes’ vote in Catholic schools across Victoria.