Mary Merkenich, Melbourne
At the end of April, the leadership of the Australian Education Union (AEU) brokered a deal with the Victorian Labor government that ended a campaign by teachers for a 30% wage rise over three years, improved working conditions, smaller class sizes, a massive reduction in contract teaching and earnest attention to the critical teacher shortage.
The deal, announced on April 30, has been hailed by the AEU officials as a breakthrough. It promises a 12% pay rise over three-and-a-half years, nothing new on class sizes, nothing on workload and promises on contract teaching that will benefit only a small proportion of contract teachers. Consequently, the teacher shortage is unlikely to be seriously resolved.
Many teachers have argued that this is not good enough and were surprised to be told by the AEU leadership that this was the best that could be got.
The deal followed two stopwork actions and mass meetings, which were attended by thousands of teachers, where AEU members indicated that they were willing to continue the fight.
Why then did the AEU leadership call off the industrial actions after only two strikes and agree to a very poor compromise? This is the question many rank-and-file unionists often ask when their union leaderships sell their members short.
The answer lies in the strategy of such leaderships, which do not see action by union members on their own behalf as desirable.
It was only after the NSW Teachers Federation called for coordinated national industrial action on September 17 last year that the Victorian AEU leadership realised it had to call its members out on strike. Members turned out in their thousands. The union was getting 100 new members a day in the weeks leading up to the strike. This was repeated for the second stopwork on March 3 this year but with increased numbers of teachers striking.
Both stopwork meetings were tightly controlled. Debate was kept to a minimum and opponents of the AEU leaders' strategy were ridiculed or heckled by their stooges in the audience. The AEU leaders had set something in motion that they were afraid would get out of their control. (Perhaps they still remembered the stopwork meeting seven years ago, where the leadership had its motion overturned by opponents from the floor.)
The AEU leaders are afraid of uncontrolled rank-and-file activity, because they are committed to a system which rewards bureaucratic union leaders who follow the rules of the bosses and the government. That means they are not committed to real democratic principles in their unions.
Instead of encouraging the broadest involvement of unionists and ideas about strategy and tactics from members, the AEU officials seek to restrain any outbreak of rank-and-file militancy since this might threaten their control over the union and their ability to be regarded by the bosses as reliable negotiating "partners".
The AEU leaders see negotiations as the central tool in winning concessions from the government. They revealed this quite clearly when they were urging some of their members to vote for the deal with the government. They explained that they had negotiated as "hard" and "smart" as anyone possibly could and this was consequently the best that could be "negotiated out of" the government.
In this, they are probably correct. However, relying on negotiations as the fundamental means to wage an industrial campaign puts unionists in a very weak position. It is like going to your boss, asking for a pay rise and expecting that if you ask nicely enough, you'll get it. Under capitalism, employers — both private and public — are in the business of cutting costs — not giving employees money just because they ask for decent wages and conditions,
Laws in this country and many others set minimum wages and rules about working conditions and health and safety standards, forcing bosses to pay workers at least a certain amount. These laws would be unnecessary if it were as simple as asking your boss for a pay rise or for good working conditions.
In fact, if it were as simple as that, unions would be unnecessary.
All of the advances workers have made — including those enshrined in legislation — have been the result of collective struggle, of mass action and grassroots solidarity.
This is the opposite of relying on some supposedly brilliant set of negotiators who will miraculously convince the bosses to increase their costs by paying higher wages or improving working conditions.
Most of these negotiations are also carried out in secret, behind closed doors, so that the rank and file has no involvement in discussions that directly affect them.
The AEU leadership went as far as forbidding its councillors — the elected representatives who were asked to vote to recommend the deal to the rank-and-file membership — from putting anything in writing about the deal until they had voted in favour of it and in favour of ceasing any industrial action.
Obviously, this meant the membership are excluded from considering the deal until the campaign had been seriously undermined. By the time the membership gets to vote on it in June, most teachers will see it as a "done deal". The momentum of the industrial campaign will have been broken and the message rank-and-file members will be getting is that their leadership has given up.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, May 19, 2004.
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