Let’s put the industrial relations back into industrial relations

Step 1 – Remove the arbitrarily imposed NSW salary cap.

Step 2 – Empower the NSW Industrial Relations Commission to hear a special work value case for teachers.

Step 3 – Implement the determinations reached and restore the teaching profession to its rightful place as a career of choice.

The notion that a salary cap is a useful device has been discredited. Indeed, a full bench of the Fair Work Commission (in awarding rail workers pay increases) indicated that the NSW State Government has no “logical basis for its public sector wages cap”.

They ruled that Sydney Trains and NSW Trains failed to put forward “any rationale, let alone a persuasive one” for the limits (the cap) imposed under its 2022 wages policy.

The ‘cap’ has been a disaster for education and will take some years to remedy. It won’t be a quick fix. Meaningful and independent industrial relations is the way forward.

Mark Northam
Secretary