State school teachers threaten to strike as pay talks stall

Teachers at Victoria’s 1600 government schools say they will walk off the job for one day next month if the state Labor government fails to make a “reasonable” pay offer.

The Australian Education Union (AEU) says the strike, the first generalised shutdown of the state school system since 2013, will go ahead on March 24 if the government continues to “disrespect” its education workforce.

Talks on pay and conditions for the state’s 52,000 government school teachers have continued since last year, with the union growing increasingly vocal about the lack of progress in the negotiations and mounting evidence of the underfunding of public schools.

The union wants a 35 per cent pay increase over three years, with a 14 per cent increase in the first year alone.

A ballot of the schools workforce, which has been in a militant mood for several years, is underway, and majority support for protected industrial action would pave the way for the threatened shutdown.

The union’s Victorian branch president, Justin Mullaly, confident that the ballot process would produce a pro-strike majority, said the industrial action would go ahead if the government failed to come up with a reasonable pay offer before March 24.

“We have been negotiating in good faith with the Allan Labor government to deliver the salaries and conditions that school staff need,” Mullaly said.

“Their failure to come to the table with an offer is downright disrespectful.”

The union first raised the spectre of strike action in April, last year, in pursuit of its demand for pay rises for 52,000 Victorian government school educators.

Victorian graduate teachers are the worst paid in the country, earning $13,000 less than the country’s best-paid graduates in the Northern Territory and $8700 less than those in NSW.

Mullaly previously linked Victoria’s relatively poor pay for teachers to chronic staff shortages in state schools, leading to increasingly heavy workloads. He has argued that a significant pay rise would attract more graduates and bring teachers who had left the profession back into the fold.

The office of Education Minister Ben Carroll was contacted for comment on Friday.

Carroll had previously said he too believed Victorian teachers deserved to be paid on par with their interstate counterparts.

“I do believe our teachers are some of the most hardworking, talented in the nation. And I do believe they should have competitive wages with their interstate counterparts,” the minister said in April.

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