Deal is Done !

Hi Colleagues,

This morning Mary Bluett announced that the AEU would be formally accepting the deal struck between the AEU and the Brumby government. As far as we know a majority of AEU members voted yes at all of the ratification meetings.

While Teachers Alliance along with many other individual AEU members campaigned strongly against this deal we accept that the majority has determined to accept it.

We applaud the strong and inspiring committment shown by the majority of AEU members during our industrial campaign. As the AEU officials have said on several occassions it was this committment of the members to campaign hard and to continue industrial action which got the government to begin to negotiate more seriously after months of stalling.

So it seems such a pity that we have been forced to accept second best. We were planning our strongest and most powerful industrial action; to stop work during the NAPLAN tests (and there were talks in the other States of a national stopwork against the NAPLAN tests if Victoria went ahead) when the plug was pulled on our campaign and our officials announced that they had negotiated the "deal we have been fighting for"!!!!!!

We also had enormous support from the public. We remember pedestrians clapping us as we marched through the city streets. There were many letters in the daily papers arguing for us. Additionally there was no real pressure from the government on us to give in. We could have taken the campaign further to get a much better deal and a fairer deal for all teachers.

The information we have received from many teachers who voted yes is that they are not very happy with this offer at all. However they feel that once the "plug" had been pulled from the campaign it would have been too hard to restart it and that we had lost the support of the public because both Brumby and our union leaders had described the deal as wonderful. Consequently we would have been seen as greedy. Additionally many teachers said that they just don't trust this leadership to do better.

Of course there are teachers, who are happy about the deal because they personally will benefit.

However it is important to understand that the process of voting is also quite misleading. In many AEU sub-branches the vote was split but they still tied their delegates to vote according to the majority. In other sub-branches they tried to reflect the split vote and determined that some of their delegates should vote yes and others no. Still other sub-branches did not tie their delegates at all, which is actually the way the process is supposed to work. Why?

We have ratification meetings where discussion and debate takes place. This is designed to give delegates the opportunity to hear different viewpoints, especially from other sub-branches. Delegates should be able to decide which way to vote after having heard this discussion and debate. Obviously they are expected to take into account the way their sub-branch voted and the opinions expressed in their sub-branch meetings and then be prepared to report back and explain which way they finally cast their vote.

If sub-branches tie their delegates there really is no need for a discussion or debate at the ratification meetings. In fact there is no need for a meeting. We could all just send in the results of the votes from sub-branches. However the AEU has a tradition of making this form (as opposed to a mass meeting vote) of ratification more democratic than a referendum process.

Mary Merkenich
AEU Councillor
Teachers Alliance
view our web site at www.teachers-alliance.org