PARTISAN!

Owen Hsi discusses the context behind the recent teachers’ strikes in Western Australia.

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For the first time in a decade, thousands of teachers in Western Australia took protected industrial action fighting for increased renumeration and improved working conditions. The State School Teachers’ Union of Western Australia (SSTUWA) is seeking a new general agreement covering the salary and working conditions of teachers and principals across the state, with workload concerns a top priority.

The strike has affected over 800 schools in WA, as they either partially or fully close for the day. A large well attended rally was held in Perth, coinciding with simultaneous events several regional centres including Albany, Karratha and Kalgoorlie-Boulder. As of the last round of talks, the SSTUWA asked for a 12 per cent pay rise over two years. But the government’s counteroffer was for a 11 per cent raise over three years; only a paltry 0.25% increase since the previous round of negotiations. After inflation, the proposed counteroffer, would lead to a pay cut in real terms.

The SSTUWA has also demanded a range of measures to improve workplace conditions: they have highlighted the presence of overwork with a proliferation of non-core administrative tasks added to teachers workloads, that class sizes have increased to some of the largest in the country; and that increasing student complexity, with pressures from students with additional needs and rising anti-social behaviour in classrooms, is leading to a wave of teacher burnout and resignation from the profession.

Extensive detail of the bargaining and industrial activity, including the list of recommendations to improve education can be found in the report Facing the Facts – a review into public education in Western Australia – which can be accessed on the well documented SSTUWA website: https://www.sstuwa.org.au/

As a section of the working class with perhaps some of the best literacy, the communications of the SSTUWA are second to none. The way that they SSTUWA have communicated with the parents of the students affected by the industrial action, and the wider community, should serve as a model for the working class generally.

In recent decades, trade unions have faced declining membership across the board. According to a 2022 report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, only 12.5% of employees (1.4 million) were trade union members, contrasted with a figure of 41% in 1992 (ABS, 2022).

This massive decline can be understood as the outcome of the Australian Council of Trade Unions signing the incomes and prices accord agreement with the Labor Party in 1983, agreeing to abandon industrial campaigns in return for wage indexation and the provision of progressive reforms, such as Medicare, Pensions and other social security payments.

Having largely abandoned industrial activity, unions have increasingly lost visibility and relevance in the modern workplace and today are primarily filled by the skilled and better paid layer of the working class who mostly use their union membership as a form of ‘insurance’ to help with HR issues and petty grievances at work.

Teachers have a role to play in reviving the trade union movement back from a shadow of its former self. The clear union communications of the SSTUWA should serve as an exemplar towards organising the unorganised precarious sections of the working class – i.e. gig economy workers, agricultural workers etc, and creating links between different sections of industry.

Secondly, the teachers must be ready to tackle their own leadership and be ready to transform their one day partial school closure of 3 hours to a prolonged campaign if required to get their’ demands met. Under conditions of rampant inflation and a rocketing cost of living, a pay rise of 11% over three years is not one that is acceptable. Teachers in Western Australia should continue to struggle for their original list of demands to prevent the workers in their profession from falling into immiseration, pauperisation and ruin.

Against the powerful tendencies that may seek compromise and to bind the teachers to compulsory arbitration, it could be necessary to renew the top leadership of the SSTUWA to make it a more forthright, militant union.

And to the state government ministers who will highlight the ‘unviability’ of these demands:

“If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish.” – Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program (1935).