The IEU’s SIA campaign is a fight for fairness
This has been an extraordinary year for our union – marked by an unprecedented attempt by the Victorian Catholic employers to go behind our backs to land a ‘deal’ before negotiations on a new multi-employer Agreement could even begin.
This move was a major campaigning challenge for us, because we required support from non-members as well as members to achieve our goal of unified and fair single interest bargaining in Victorian Catholic schools.
So, I’m really proud to say that our grassroots campaign secured majority support amongst staff at 28 of 36 Victorian Catholic education employers in just three weeks, enabling us to lodge a Single Interest Authorisation (SIA) application with the Fair Work Commission.
Running a successful union campaign in competition with one run by a well-resourced corporate entity like the Victorian Catholic Education Authority (VCEA) takes a lot of emails, meetings, phone calls, materials and social media work. The IEU of course did all of these things, but those activities merely backed up our biggest asset – member-led grassroots conversations.
Despite the VCEA’s highly funded, slick marketing, its barrage of all-staff communications, and the obstacles it placed in the way of IEU Reps and Organisers, it was thousands of persuasive, passionate, informative conversations in workplaces that delivered the statements of support that enabled the union to lodge an SIA application so quickly.
For too long, the IEU has been forced to negotiate the Victorian Catholic Schools Agreement without the basic bargaining rights available to workers in other school systems across Australia. These include the right to access Good Faith Bargaining orders and the right to take protected industrial action.
New federal laws now let us seek an SIA to unlock core bargaining rights, so we’re no longer forced to bargain with one arm tied behind our backs ̶ that’s why we fought so hard for all those Statements of Support.
Our Log of Claims is ambitious, but it needs to be. There is a crisis in schools right now which will only be addressed through respectful and fair negotiations. Significant wage increases are needed, but so are improvements to workload and conditions for Education Support staff and school leaders, amongst many other things.
On 21 October, when we filed the SIA application, we wrote to VCEA chief Elizabeth Lebone asking that her organisation:
Consent to an SIA for all employers
Meet with us to start planning a way forward under an SIA
Pay 7% and $1500 offered as part of their deal as interim wage rises while we bargain fairly for the next Agreement.
As we go to print, (early November) the VCEA has not replied, despite our requests aligning with Catholic social teaching and the Church’s Good Works guide, which affirms workers’ rights and sets clear, principled bargaining standards for Catholic employers
We’re ready to start bargaining so that we can get higher wages and improved conditions in place as soon as possible. The delay is entirely a result of the employer’s decision making.
Why the SIA campaign matters to all IEU members
The SIA campaign is a fight for basic workers’ rights that affects staff across all schools ̶ and even other industries.
Our groundbreaking application uses new laws intended to take back some of the considerable ground lost on workers’ rights in Australia over recent decades.
We’ve received strong support from other IEU branches and the broader union movement because our Single Interest Authorisation application ̶ designed to ensure staff can, if needed, take protected industrial action or seek good-faith bargaining orders from the Fair Work Commission ̶ is nationally the largest and most significant test of the new laws.
Our campaign is about basic rights recognised worldwide but historically denied to some Australian workers, highlighting how far we still have to go to level the industrial playing field.
Pay and conditions in the Catholic and state sectors set the benchmarks to meet or beat in independent school bargaining, and we are already winning great outcomes in many Victorian independent schools where members can point to the significant pay increases that are likely in Catholic and government schools. We need to win an SIA to set these benchmarks, and we will.
We plan so we can win
Back in 2023 the IEU Victoria Tasmania branch made a decision that it was time to review the way we were doing things and to examine whether the structures we had in place and the way in which we were deploying our resources was optimising outcomes for members.
The first thing we thought about was what our purpose as an organisation actually is – and it didn’t take all that long for us to come up with the following as a starting point:
The IEU Victoria Tasmania is a strong union that effectively advocates and campaigns to win on the professional and industrial interests of members, and for broader social justice.
Using that statement guide us, the decisions that we have made over the past two years have set us up to succeed. We are a much stronger campaigning union, a union that trains Reps and activists, a union that advocates for our members and a union that is focused on the interests of members.
I’m proud to lead our team of over 50 staff and 20,000 members across 2 states. With deals to land next year in the Catholic sectors in Victoria and Tasmania and in independent schools across both states we’ll need to be at our best – and we will be.
For now though – I hope that every IEU member gets some time for a break over summer. I know that you deserve it.
