I’ve been reading over the media reports of the new pay deal for teachers that has brought The Editor almost to the brink of orgasm – and, as expected, some things don’t add up. According to Victorian politicians the deal makes the state’s teachers “the highest paid in the country”, and The Age’s little insert certainly seems to verify this:

State-by-state teacher salaries:
Maximum for a classroom teacher
Victoria – 2007: $65,414, 2008: $75,500
NSW – 2007: $72,454, 2008: $75,352
Queensland – 2007: $69,225, 2008: $71,994
South Australia – 2007: $68,422, 2008: $68,422
West Australia – 2007: $67,446, 2008: $71,206
ACT – 2007: $71,767, 2008: $74,279
Northern Territory: 2007: $70,047, 2008: $72,849

Sounds good, classroom teachers getting a $10k raise straight-up this year. Yet when you read the fine print that’s not actually how it works: the additional $10k will be phased in over three years: 4.9% in the first (about $3,200, taking them to about $68,600) and 2.7% in the second and third years of the agreement. That still leaves them well below NSW teachers at any given time.

In 2010 Victorian teachers’ pay will certainly overtake NSW teachers’ salary rates – but they’ll be the NSW salary rates of 2008 - and it’s highly likely that NSW teachers will have renegotiated their own agreement by then (it expires this year). Brumby and Pike’s claim that Victorian teachers will be the best-paid in Australia looks to be smoke-and-mirrors.

But it’s not all doom and gloom – The Editor gets $1000 to put on the bar at the Grodscorp Christmas Party. Huzzah!

UPDATE

According to the press today I am wrong, that this $10k pay jump is instantaneous and those scumbag Maoist teachers are actually getting 33-38% over the life of the agreement (sounds a bit far-fetched if you ask me). But the government is still sticking to its 4.9% thang. We’ll probably have to rely on The Ed to give us a clearer picture once he receives his new pay scales (if he has sobered up by then). 

Also, Zombie Mao informs us that the Oz is informing us that this will be the end of the fiscal world as we know it.

Details are still sketchy but news is spreading around the teacher gossip network like bird flu. It seems that teachers — who have been locked in negotiations with a government that didn’t really want to negotiate for 18 months — have successfully told education minister Bronwyn Pike to stick her sub-inflation offer of 3.5% per year and instead grant Victorian teachers (the worst paid in the country) pay parity with their NSW colleagues. With virtually no productivity trade-offs teachers have been offered payrises of between $5000 and $10,000 with a John Howard-style $1000 once off bribe payment thrown in for good measure. Again, I’m not sure of the exact details but will update this post when they are officially released.

UPDATE: From ABC Online

The Premier John Brumby says the salary of a graduate teacher will rise by about $5,000 and senior teachers will get a $10,000 pay rise.

“We’ll make the classroom teachers the highest paid anywhere in Australia,” he said.

Mr Brumby, says they gave the teachers more than the original offer of 3.25 per cent because the union has agreed to boost productivity by spending more time with students.

“They will get an extra 10 minutes of tuition everyday.”

The Education Union’s Mary Bluett says top teachers will get a 15 per cent pay rise and graduate teachers 9.5 per cent over three years.

“The salary will actually reflect the importance of the job of teaching,” she said.

“That would do a lot to retain the teachers that we have here in the state.”

Under the deal, three of the four pupil-free days will be moved to before the start of the school year and teachers will get a one-off $1,000 cash bonus.

UPDATE II: Check out the ABC’s apostrophe problems.

I blame teachers.

Victorian Premier John Brumby chants that education is his number one priority like a mantra, but utterly fails in making it so — Victoria can proudly claim that it has the lowest paid teachers in the country. After months of negotiations with the teachers’ union (following months of the government refusing to negotiate at all) the union has reduced its ambit claim of 10% per year to nothing more than pay parity with NSW teachers. But Brumby won’t budge from the government’s standard offer of a barely-CPI 3.25% rise per year with anything over this figure to be offset by productivity gains. Ask any teacher where there’s room in their work day for extra productivity and they’ll probably laugh at you before punching your lights out.

But here’s the weird thing: Victorian opposition leader, the Liberals’ Ted Baillieu, is promising to make Victorian teachers the best paid in the country if elected in 2010. This shit’s messing with my mind.

Australian Education Union (Victorian branch) members today received an email from Branch President Mary Bluett. In the email Mary reiterated the reasons behind the series of four hour rolling stoppages that begin tomorrow and attached a recent letter (PDF) she wrote to education minister Bronwyn Pike, along with Pike’s response (PDF). Remembering that I am a total orthographic Nazi and a teacher, imagine my horror when I saw this in Bluett’s letter.

My retinas!

Firstly, Mary Bluett used to be a teacher so she has no excuse. Secondly, that must surely be somebody between Mary Bluett and the fax machine whose job it is to do a spot of proof reading and prevent that sort of shite ending up on the minister for education’s desk.

Mary Bluett’s school teachers obviously spent too much time forcing her to watch indigenous apologies, debate Australian politics and plant trees.

UPDATE (8:10pm): As Junaman points out in comments there is an error in Bronwyn Pike’s letter that I totally missed.

Bluett – 1, Pike – 1

Yesterday Victorian teachers stopped work in support of a pay rise that is above the rate of inflation and that reflects the fact that we are the lowest paid teachers in the country, a reduction in the number of teachers (20%) on short-term contracts, and smaller class sizes. I met my comrades from work at 8:30am for a couple of lattes before jumping on a tram to the city. Even though Craig isn’t a teacher, but a self-employed IT technician, he gave his boss the finger and went on a sympathy strike.

As we walked along the Yarra River towards the Vodafone Arena we sung The Internationale and swore pledges of allegiance to Marxism and Che Guevara.

Upon arrival at the Vodafone Arena we were heartened by the sea of workers proudly dressed in the colour of socialism.

After listening to stirring speeches about the evils of capitalism and unthinkingly endorsing whatever resolutions the union leadership told us to we marched as one towards Parliament House.

At Parliament House we shouted, screamed and snarled to let Premier John Brumby know how angry we were.

After chanting some witty slogans we did what all good teachers do in the afternoon of a strike day: we hit the piss.

Just now on ABC’s Insiders, Treasurer Peter Costello claimed that being a union member is equivalent to being a union official. Pressed by host Barrie Cassidy to explain how Shadow Treasurer Wayne Swan was a union official as claimed by Liberal Party advertising, the best Costello could do was point towards his AWU membership.

In the interest of full disclosure I must declare that I am a union official due to my membership of the AEU. The Liberal Party says that 70% of the Labor front bench are union officials, so lets try and work out what percentage of GrodsReaders are union officials. Drop a quick ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in comments to indicate your union membership status.

UPDATE: Screw the comments thing; let’s GrodsPoll it.

When I started teaching this year I thought long and hard about whether I should join the teachers’ union, the AEU. In the end I handed over my direct debit details and signed up for a few reasons: Firstly, I believe that teachers (and subsequently, I) should be paid more money and I think that the AEU does and will work hard to ensure that pay rates continue to rise; secondly, I want the legal backing that the union will give me if I’m ever in a workplace situation that requires it; and thirdly, the union is fighting against the scourge of contract employment in the teaching profession.

So I guess you could call me a union man in that I belong to one and I largely support the work that they do. (Largely support because there are times when the union muscles into debates, such as curriculum development, when I don’t support them. Single-issue organisations trying to hijack nuanced debates that require reasoned and sensible discussions between experts and stakeholders pisses me off.) I also guess that you could call me a Labor man in that I have previously, and plan to continue, voting for or preferencing the ALP.

However, something in Jason Koutsoukis’ Age column really struck me this morning:

As one prominent union leader told me the other day, for an opposition to lose an election after the government has been in power for more than 10 years it has to be really bad.

“And we’re just not that bad. In fact, I think we’re starting to look good.”

Bit Freudian that: union leader letting slip that he sees no difference between the ALP and the union movement. Playing right into John Howard’s hands, that sort of comment.

And rankles me — a Labor voter and union member — who wants the two to maintain a degree of seperation.