The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has reported in its Employment Outlook 2024 that real wages in Australia are almost 5% lower than they were before the pandemic. The OECD says real pay is 4.8% lower than in the fourth quarter of 2019 and that this is one of the largest drops in real wages among OECD countries.
Not just for the love of it
On the day the IEU held a media event to file the preschool supported bargaining application with the Fair Work Commission, a question was put to NSW Premier Chris Minns about the IEU’s claim for a 25% wage increase for preschool teachers to help community preschools address the chronic teacher shortage in this sector.
Minns told 10News, “That’s fair enough, but there’s limits to what we can provide in terms of where the money will come from. Nobody would pursue that job because they want to become rich, they do it because they passionately believe in the work that they’re doing.”
The IEU’s Vice President for Early Childhood Services, Michelle Thompson, appeared in the same 10News report saying, “Working just for the love of it is not going to pay our exorbitant rent or mortgages or provide for our own families.”
Public funding priorities
Our members are acutely aware of the importance of strong wages growth for our colleagues in government schools. This is why IEU members in Catholic systemic schools took joint strike action in 2022 with members from the NSW Teachers Federation. The award for government school teachers expires in October this year, as does the Catholic Systemic Schools Enterprise Agreement.
What the NSW government is thinking in respect of pay rises for government school teachers is anyone’s guess. The government is speaking about constraints around government sector funding, reflected in the Premier’s comments above.
Such concerns are not unfounded, but as with all decisions about public funding, the question is one of priorities and, in our view, education must be a high priority.
The NSW government has offered public servants a 10.5% wage increase (inclusive of a 1% increase to superannuation) across the next three years. Public sector unions are seeking a better deal.
Industrial action not taken lightly
Members of the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association have been taking rolling stop work action at hospitals across the state seeking pay rises to address their concerns that nurses are moving interstate for higher wages. There has been industrial action in the light rail service in Sydney and elsewhere as essential workers seek cost-of-living relief after years of wage suppression and recent inflationary spikes.
Working people do not take industrial action lightly and, as our members know, there are significant hurdles to clear before protected industrial action can be taken. As inconvenient as stop work action can be for the public, the workers themselves are the ones most inconvenienced by the need to take such action.
Saving capitalism from excesses
Economist Ross Gittins recently wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald, “When it comes to industrial relations, it’s always the unions that look bad, never the employers. That’s because the world is run by bosses. When everyone does what the boss tells them to, there’s never a problem … It’s always greedy workers who strike and make you walk to work, never intransigent bosses. The media almost invariably fall for this characterisation.”
Gittins explained: “Not enough people understand the unions’ role in the economy and how they go about advancing their members’ interests. The mistake is to imagine that the bosses represent capitalism, whereas the unions represent anti-capitalism …The true contest is between the representatives of the two main ‘factors of production’: capital and labour.
“So unions are an integral part of the modern capitalist system. They’re a countervailing force that helps keep the system in balance. Take out the unions, and capital ends up with almost all the money, and the households whose income comes from selling their labour have very little. In which case, the capitalists have no one to buy their products. Unions save the capitalists from their own excesses.”
Workloads are still a primary concern for our members in schools, but without attracting people into the profession and holding onto current staff, work intensification issues cannot be resolved.
We must continue to press for decent rates of paywhile addressing other concerns of workloads and conditions if our members are to be able to pay their exorbitant rent or mortgages and provide for their families. We do this best when we are united with purpose.