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.

Today’s Crikey has an interesting snippet:

I have been told that some Victorian state school principals get a percentage bonus if they can make staff savings within the school. For example, if a teacher goes on long service leave, and instead of being replaced by another teacher, they are replaced by the teachers within the school (as extras or in-lieus, which cost the school nothing), then the principal gets a percentage of the money that would have gone to hiring the teacher. My current principal apparently got a five figure bonus last year from this. It may just be Victorian Education Dept policy, or it may be a school based one, I’m not too sure.

Speaking as one of the poor (and regularly striking) underpaid teachers, I think it stinks to high heaven. That the school administration makes these decisions … based on personal profit, not educational lines, is wrong. That this is hidden from most staff is even worse. Incidentally, the feeling among many Victorian state teachers is either: a) We should be taking more comprehensive action (like the nurses last year) to achieve our goals, ie. full day strikes, but we are too bound by the old workchoices legislation. b) We should be withdrawing our support and involvement in the extra-curricular activities we do. The only way the parents can see how under pressure we are.

Teachers have been against performance-based pay for ages, saying how it’s good in theory but impractical and indefinable in practice. But this is evidence that performance-based pay is possible: just work your way up to principal, screw your colleagues over, save the department a fat wad of cash and walk away with enough for a new plasma TV and a trip to Fiji.

On another note, what should The Ed be withdrawing or withholding to give added teeth to the strike? I suggest he refuses to give out any stale Minties, lend any colour pencils and post any more Fleshlight jokes until Pike coughs up his 10 per cent.   

Ain’t wage rises funny? In January my own salary went up by 4 per cent. Nurses last year won a base increase of 3.25 per cent. Victorian teachers want 10 per cent but although they’re poking John Brumby in the arse with a sharp stick, it doesn’t look like they’ll get more than 3.5-4 per cent. Meanwhile, those on the minimum wage must’ve danced in the street last July: they scored between 1 and 1.9 per cent, or $5-10 a week. And the goose who came up with that last figure?

Fair Pay Commissioner Ian Harper - who works for the Federal Government advising on pay standards in addition to private business interests - got a $38,000 pay rise while he considered the plight of the nation’s minimum wage workers last year and decided to award them just $10 extra a week.

Prof Harper’s own pay packet for his part-time job advising the Federal Government on fair wages has jumped 47 per cent from $81,445 to $119,830 a year after the Commonwealth Remuneration Tribunal awarded him a rise. (Source)

Someone call Prodos - his ‘trickle-down capitalism’ seems to have a fricken big blockage.

Just had a job interview and in the middle of it had a bizarre out-of-body experience when I heard myself talking like Lachlan Connor. “You see a classroom is a community, and my students are part of that classroom, and so to build a positive school community I need to build positive students in my classroom.”

ps/- Why do I need to go to a job interview less than twelve months after getting a job? You can thank the Victorian Government’s over-reliance on contract employment for public school teachers. That’s one of the reasons that we’re stopping work tomorrow; along with the fact that Victorian teachers are on the lowest salaries in Australia. See you at Vodafone Arena at 10am.